Sounded like conditions were exceptional last night. Around
0830z I was hearing YV1DIG with Q5 sigs while listening
from my home QTH here in Tujunga, Ca. I have never been
able to hear him at all before, so I figured conditions might be
good and decided to drive over to the local club station where I
would have a better TX antenna to work with (I couldn't raise
YV1DIG from home with my glorified dummy load). When I
arrived at the club station, I was really surprised by how many
strong Caribbean signals were coming through. C6ALK and
CO8LY were both running low power, but had S7 to S9 signals
here. ZF2NT was a solid S9+20dB on the FT-1000 S-meter
which according to measurement I made just 2 weeks ago is
an honest-to-goodness -50dBm!!
The real eye opener, however, was when I ran into VK3ZL up
around 1843 KHz. He was so loud that at first I thought
perhaps I was listening to a pirate. His signals were a solid
S7 to S9 here, whereas usually he is barely readable through
all the local noise.
Around 1000z, something happened to the band and most
of the signals dropped. I wasn't watching the time real close,
but it seemed like in the space of about 5 minutes the band
transitioned from extremely "hot" to normal. 5 minutes. Later
on when I heard VK3ZL again (this time ragchewing with W8JI),
Bob's signal had dropped down to 339 such that I could just
tell he was in there when Tom turned it over to him.
In any case, this is an example of what makes topband so
interesting. Mostly it's hours and hours of QRN and PW signals,
but every once in a while something happens and it is as if
160 is transformed into 28 MHz at a sunspot peak. Guess it
just goes to show that most of the time, there is a ton of
absorption that fools us into to thinking that the unimpeded
path loss is higher than it really is.
73 de Mike, W4EF...............................
_______________________________________________
Topband mailing list
Topband@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/topband
|