[RTTY] 160 meter Activity Night?

[Bill Turner]

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:27:17 -0400, "Joe Subich, W4TV"
<w4tv at subich.com> wrote:

>From a technical perspective 160 meters poses significant issues 
>for skywave RTTY.  In particular, multipath and differential 
>fading are much worse than even on 80 meters (and they are already 
>problem there).  

------------ REPLY FOLLOWS ------------

I've heard that mantra all my radio life but by own experience does
not bear it out. In my log right now, I have 2772 80 meter RTTY QSOs
and 23 160 meter RTTY QSOs (eight states). I don't recall any
particular problem copying them as long as they were above the noise
level as with any other band. That old wive's tale probably came from
the days of wide shift (850 Hz used to be standard) and before the
days of MMTTY with it's selectable filters. For those new to this, the
wider the shift, the more prone to selective fading, one of reasons
170 Hz has become standard in amateur radio.

Half the fun of the proposed Activity Night would be comparing notes
and finding this stuff out, right? Who wants to try a comparison
between 850 and 170 Hz shift or even narrower on 160? Might be
interesting.

And by the way, no need to worry about "cluttering the band with
another high power local signal". The digital section especially, is
mostly empty all night long. Let's fill it up! 

Monitoring 1809 kHz.

Bill W6WRT