My own motivation to use legal limit power is man-made noise on the
other end.
In the 1980's I worked lots of QRP. First just one watt in DSB, then I
improved to 5W in DSB, then 5W in SSB, then 30W. In those years most
hams could hear me just fine - with lower signal reports than 100W
stations got, but still usually starting with "5".
Nowadays instead the typical noise level in cities has rosen to about S9
on 40 meters, and if I use QRP at the 5W level, almost no ham in any
city hears me. My only contacts are with a few rural hams, who have as
low a noise level as ever.
Since I moved to the forest, becoming as rural myself as one can get, I
enjoy having no manmade noise at all at most times, with atmospheric
noise setting my noise floor. But 97% of all hams live in cities! This
creates an unbalanced situation, and even when using 100W like most
people do here, most of the time I can copy all other stations fine,
while most of them have trouble copying me, due to their local noise.
That's why I'm much better off using high power - it gives city-dwelling
hams at least some chance to hear me over their local noise.
And yes, the noise bothering city-dwelling hams is almost always mostly
very local, generated in their own homes and in those of the nearest
neighbors. Noise sources more than 100m away or so are very rarely
involved. But it's still an almost unsolvable problem. In most cases it
cannot be attacked at the source, because a ham can hardly expect all of
his closest neighbors to stop using all of their LED lights, CFLs,
computers, cellphone chargers, flat panel TVs, local area networks, and
on and on. And all these devices contribute noise! And some of them
generate an incredible amount of noise.
At my station I'm nearly manmade-noise-free, because my nearest
neighbors live more than one kilometer away, there is no power grid
here, and I cleansed my own home from all noisy devices, either by
picking quiet replacements or by adding filters and shielding. But I can
tell you, it wasn't easy! The average ham won't do it even in his own
home, let alone in all of his neighbor's homes...
So it looks like the manmade noise level will keep rising, as electronic
devices made without sufficient regard for EMC keep proliferating. I see
a dim future for ham radio, at least on HF, in that context. Upgrading
to legal limit power, perhaps even raising the legal limit, and setting
up the best antennas, can only buy us some time.
In cities the best technique is to "escape up", using the tallest towers
possible, and antennas that extend from the tower tip horizontally or
upwards, rather than down from it. This is to place the antenna as far
outside the thickest part of the electrosmog cloud, which is densest in
homes, around them, and around cabling for power, TV, internet, etc. But
of course, precisely these much-required tall towers are ever more
restricted by laws!
So I think that ham HF operation will ever more become a privilege of
the few of us who live in rural places. I could cite a long list of
formerly very active hams who have gone QRT, simply because at their
city homes they can no longer find a way to hear any other hams.
Manfred
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Visit my hobby homepage!
http://ludens.cl
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