N0FP wrote
. . . snip . . .
>This reminds me of a story told to me by my friend Al K0AD about Chicago "back
>in the 'olden' days." Everybody used 160M mobile to stay in touch.
>
I grew up in Hammond (northwest Indiana) and the 160m mobile operations
that Ford referred to had a lot to do with the daily Calumet Area
Emergency Net on 1805KHz (if I remember correctly). In fact the CAEN was
my first exposure to Amateur Radio on my NC-60 during my SWLing days
before I received my Novice license in 1961. Al K0AD (then K9DHN) lived
a couple miles away from me, and I remember riding with him on several
160m fox hunts. Enough reminiscing.
As for propagation during the day on 160m, I would expect two decent
stations (KWs and noise levels of a rural setting) to be able to work
each other out to 1500km or so - and that depends on the day-to-day
variation of the ionosphere (specifically the D region). Being near
solar minimum helps, as that minimizes absorption due to D region
ionization from hard x-ray wavelengths. But we're still limited by the
second source of daytime D region ionization - that from a hydrogen
spectral line at 121.5nm.
This year seemed to have the most daytime CQers that I can recall in
many years. I agree with Ford that we won't work any DX, but there's
still a lot of continental stuff to work.
Carl K9LA
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