Topband: Nobody can hear me

[Gary Smith]

> I have not had time to build a new antenna for 160 so I tried the DX sloper.  I could hear pretty well with several stations over S9 so I tried throwing my call in a couple of times at 100 watts and got no response.  I hesitate to use much power on the sloper because NU5D warned me his end insulator caught fire.  Anyway I tried again at 500 watts, still nobody could hear me so I risked it and tried 1kw, still no response.  Then I figured if this antenna is so worthless I will try again  pushing the limit but still got no response at 1500+ so this antenna must be totally worthless.  I cannot get any higher than 60' for the center and one tower has too many antennas on it to try to use it for a vertical and my other tower is a crankup 3 section.  I plan to try the linear loaded dipole soon and see if it will work.
> WB5OXQ

FWIW,

My station is not a big gun. I'm running about a KW into an Inv-L, 40 
radials with half on a salt marsh & the other ones on the bog beside 
it. The salt marsh & damp soil give me a really nice radial field and 
the K9ay is on the marsh. I have a K3 so I hear as good as I'm going 
to with this amp & antenna. I am amazed how many times I have to call 
some DX before they come to my call. Sometimes I hear nobody calling 
the DX (understandable from so far away) but the DX is not calling to 
anyone. 

I know my signal isn't that of a super station but it's not chopped 
liver either. 

I think what happens a lot has to do with where people have their 
filters set. I notice people calling maybe 100-200Hz off to the side 
of center frequency and the DX often goes to them and I need to 
either use split or the XIT to transmit off freq I listen to them on 
their transmitted freq. Not really split operation but kind of a mini 
split.

So either their filters have an uncorrected offset or they have a 
discrepency between transmit and rx elsewhere.

Just a guess but what I see in practice supports this hypothesis.

Last night I just didn't bother to waste time trying to work a lot of 
those stations as the next one was usually listening dead on. 

Gary
KA1J