[SECC]

[Ed Sleight]

Well, time is growing short for the contests, and as usual, I'm working
on the antennas.

But I did something yesterday which may be of interest. I have a recent
download of the FCC database, and wrote a short program to sort out the
number of hams in each call district. Now obviously, some 4s don't live
in 4 land,,,nothing to be done with that.

Anyway, this is what I found. The following is the population of hams in
each district in two forms. (1) All licenses and (2) Extra only. The
figures for the extra calls are from a database before the cw
requirements were trashed.

Call area 1        All 39,857        Extras  26,403
	  2            56,916                37,165
          3            40,300                27,124
          4           125,635                73,143
          5            72,857                43,962
          6           111,914                59,145
          7            73,877                41,693
          8            61,215                38,351
          9            51,514                32,569
          0            57,751                36,344

Notice the huge difference in the 6th call area.

Anyway, and this is mostly for the upcoming SS, viewing these numbers
makes me thing that orientation of your antenna, especially on 40 and
80, is a critical factor. With a beam width of better than 50 degrees,
it would seem the best orientation for me would be about 030 degrees.

Now comes the question...using these figures, what TO angles would you
guys think would be optimal? Your opinions on the other bands would be
interesting also. 

And of course, any other comments.

73
Ed

--
SECC on the Web:          http://secc.contesting.com/
Submissions:              secc@contesting.com
Administrative requests:  secc-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems:                 owner-secc@contesting.com