Tree, We are at a sunspot maximum? 10M sure as heck didn't get the memo. There was a whole bunch more DX on 160 last nite than on 10 today! And that's fine by me! Tim N3QE Hi all. Until a few nights
Dave... would it be a fair extrapolation to take your last sentence, and draw the conclusion that if adding radials changes feed impedance, then there was actual ground loss in the near field? Or tha
Last night and tonight there were several 80M stations, and one 160M station, that were in big demand in North America and I guess worldwide, given who they were coming back to. The callers were all
Thanks for the insight guys. I know the DX is far more experienced than me, and I think I gained some insight into what they must be hearing on their end on the low bands. Earlier this fall (first we
Zone 5 advantage? Top LP scores in ARRL 160 are consistently from the midwest (Zone 4). Tim N3QE ________________________________________ From: Topband [topband-bounces@contesting.com] on behalf of J
On the "doublet" vs "dipole": at various times in history, the word "dipole" was taken by some to mean "quarter wave dipole", and doublet was a more general term for a balanced antenna. I will look i
"Trust but verify". As with SPICE or any other simulation program... garbage in, garbage out. An experienced antenna modeler knows what assumptions are good to make because of past verifications of r
Just to show how good it was... I called CQ on 160M circa 0120Z, and IMMEDIATELY was spotted by many (most? All?) reversebeacon skimmers in Europe. That is unusual for a pipsqueak like me, sometimes
If it is 5 feet high and 50 feet away... I would consider the fence to be a minor enhancement in ground conductivity 50 feet out :-). I don't think it's at all obvious that you need to move it. Tim N
Is this all being done with the portable "antenna analyzers"? Those can be surprisingly susceptible to nearby BCB stations that are out of ham bands, but detected by the analyzer and influencing the
I didn't notice the keyclicks so bad, but what did bother me was one local who had an incredible amount of (?) phase noise (it was keyed broadband noise plus whiny synth noise) up and down from his v
I find it ironic that when I was a kid we all built T/R switches to use a single antenna with our separate Transmitter and Receiver. Today we build a switch to use two antennas to interface with our
Bob (K6NV) and I were having a off-list discussion and it got me wondering.... I heard some bad signals on the east coast here, but nothing memorable that I would describe as having keyclicks. I thin
The reason we have split on 40M is only lack of a coordinated band plan between EU and W/VE. It is far and away not a desirable situation. I have been a ham who regards 40M as his home stomping groun
Out of curiosity... with so many narrow-pattern receive antenna configs, how do typical contest stations check different directions after a CQ? Frank, I still want to come visit your station during a
I had the opportunity to travel around China a lot last summer and saw many caged T-top or cage dipole antennas. Maybe they were cage dipoles, hard to tell from the distance I was at (typically I sig
I find no record of KP4KE in my CW logs or in reversebeacon data. ??? I'm guessing he's phone-only. Is this summary for CQ 160M phone or what? As to killer loud signals... TX5K (Clipperton) was comin
Heat shrink squeezes resistor. Squeezing a carbon composition resistor will decrease its resistance. Film and ceramic resistors much less affected. Remember when we were kids and played with telephon
After several less than satisfactory experiences with various outdoor sealed boxes and junctions etc. I have had my ladder line, transmit antenna, and all junctions completely exposed to the weather