Message-ID: <000101bf2e70$c6c86560$bb7f8cd4@dave>
From: "Dave Sergeant" <sergeantd@compuserve.com>
To: "rsgb_lf_group" <rsgb_lf_group@blacksheep.org>
Subject: LF: Comment
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 1999 15:22:20 -0000
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>From Dave G3YMC

1.  Currently (Friday evening and Saturday) there is extremely bad thunder static on 136, worse that I would expect at this time of year, and this makes QSOs very difficult.  Perhaps this is from the heavy storms they have been having in France.

2.  Propagation.  Mike Dennison says that the Greek RTTY is weak or inaudible during the day. This was the case here during the summer, but now winter is approaching it is copyable throughout the day, often at very good signals.  It seems to get stronger from mid afternoon onwards, but is never less than S7 at any time (and of course way over S9 at night).  It is currently (Saturday 1500) s8 and perfectly readable through the thunder crashes.

Mike says there is little groundwave at HF - yes, but  propagation seems to be quite similar to top band propagation, where there is most definitely both ground and sky wave.  On Top Band during the winter it is quite common to start hearing eastern Europeans from around 1500z in the winter, with some days signals being much stronger that others.  The patterns I am seeing on 136 follow very much the same pattern as that band, and the experiences with CFH earlier in the year (with its very rapid fade after sunrise) seem to further support this view. On this basis the optimum time for transatlantic propogation will be at dawn (0600-0800) in December and January.

3.  I read with interest the proposed method of (slightly faster) slow CW - it sounds an interesting proposal and should be fairly easy to implement for those who want to try it.  One point comes to mind however - it is probably even more important to supplement transmissions with normal speed idents, as unlike QRSS it will be totally impossible to copy it by ear.  I suggest those writing the software should bear this in mind (suggest one normal speed ident at the end of each over, as seems to be the practice on PSK31)

73s Dave G3YMC
sergeantd@compuserve.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sergeantd