TopBand: RE: TopBand HEARD Report - Wednesday - USA

[CQK8DO@aol.com]

Monitoring at K8DO began at 2100Z Wednesday evening... silenzio... By 2200 a
few stations on the east coast were calling with no signals copied on either
22 or 26.5... By 2230 the pack was in full cry, with no signals copied in mid
Michigan, but we knew that they were on 26.5 by the activities of the
frequency police... At 2240 the first propagation trickled in and Heard was
just below the noise level with one or two characters at a time rising above
the noise for Q1 copy... Signals continued fragmented until 2258 when they
became mostly Q4 S0 with dips to Q2 and brief rises to Q5 S1 at times...
signals suddenly appeared on the 45 degree beverage for approx. 5 minutes
centered around 2258 then just as suddenly disappeared, not to be heard on
any beverage after that... All useable copy occured on the 120 degree lobe of
the vertically polarized, transmit array... unlike previous nights they
continued to peak and dip past 2315... they were in and out, with K8DO and
K8OT continuing to monitor, and calling briefly when propagation would hit a
peak... Murphy smiled at 2344 when they were briefly 509 (right at the noise
level) and K8DO called once and was rewarded with a report at 2344Z... As the
wives were present we were informed that we were taking them to dinner then
and there, so monitoring ceased...

This was the strangest propagation so far... First a bit of an aside:
Michigan had 24 hours of rain and thawing temperatures after weeks of snow,
zero temps, and breath taking winds... as a result we spent the afternoon
wading through flooded woods and fields laying out a 1000 foot beverage to
the SE just for Heard... most of the beverage in the field is on the ground
(actually, under 2 to 6 inches of water for much of its length)...the intent
was to finish early at the office today and pound in tee posts to support the
wire... this morning the temp is 11 degrees, the wind is bending the trees,
the field is a solid ice sheet, and I suspect that beverage will remain  IN
 the ground until spring... 
Now, back to net control:

The beverages were useless!!!  with the exception of a less than 5 minute
period when Heard briefly appeared on the EU beverage, there was no useable
copy on any beverage... especially, the freshly laid, submarine,
 unterminated, 1000 footer pointed SE to Heard... We were so shocked that we
kept jumping up to the pileup, and switching among the beverages to prove to
ourselves that nothing was  broken... also, the atmospherics were way down...
the receive noise level on the transmit array was S1 with an intermittent big
crash, with the RF gain full up... we actually felt like we needed to hook
the ZJ Beverage Box back up to the beverages...

Cheers  ...  Denny

We be happy campers this morning.... I will continue to monitor and do
reports...

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