Topband: Where is everyone?

[Tim Shoppa]

Some of us are looking at the contest calendar for next 7 consecutive
weekends (CQWWSSB; ARRLSSCW; WAERTTY; ARRLSSSSB; CQWWCW; ARRL160M; ARRL10M)
and spending some quality time with our families in advance! I will be on
full-bore for the Pre-Stew but that's only one night so no big deal.

I haven't been at home during the day, but conditions seem to have been
surprisingly good on the high bands, and locals that are home during the
day are reporting working exotic locations all around the world on 12M.

I thought 40M and 80M were really sucky in WAG last weekend - weak signals
and flutter on everything from Germany yet all the southern Europeans were
pounding in loud and clear. That same weekend 20M was dang good.

I did have a few nights of spectacularly good 160M conditions to EU in
September. Sept 15 I worked a bunch of loud Europeans at my local midnight
and Sept 16 was superb to Scandinavia at my sunset.

Tim N3QE

On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 2:03 AM, Donald Chester <k4kyv at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Here it is Friday  night, with relatively little QRN, but only a couple of
> signals are audible across the entire 160m band.  80/75m has a few more
> signals than that, but it's sparsely occupied as well.  Usually by this
> late in the season one will hear plenty of activity in the evening,
> especially on weekends.  I have noticed this dearth of activity for several
> weeks now; it's as if this year's radio season hasn't got off the ground
> yet, despite the fact that we are almost midway through autumn and the
> summer QRN has substantially subsided.
>
> Is this a trend, and is this becoming the new normal?  They keep telling
> us we now have a record number of hams in the FCC data base, over 700,000.
> Those hams certainly aren't on the air, at least not on 160, 80 or 40m.  I
> can  remember not that many years ago when at this stage in the season on a
> quiet weekend night one had to scout around to find a clear spot to call
> CQ.  So far this year, the bands have all had vast swathes of unused
> frequencies, but the signals that are heard appear to be at normal
> strength, so the  bands apparently aren't dead.
>
> Don k4kyv
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