Those of you who are ARRL members may be interested in my Technical Correspondence article in May 2020 QST, entitled "The 60th Anniversary of the First Satellite Contact."
The contact to which it refers took place on February 6, 1960, six months before NASA's Project Echo, between myself and K3JTE (now W3PK), making use of a propagation mode first reported by W8JK (SK), which he called "the satellite ionization phenomenon."
My May 2020 QST article describes what we did and what has been learned since then about the ionosphere and how W8JK's mechanism works. For further reading about our contact, see my article in Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, September 1961. For more about the satellite ionization phenomenon, see the chapter by W8JK in S.F. Singer, ed., Interactions of Space Vehicles With an Ionized Atmosphere, Pergamon Press, 1965.
73 Ray W2RS