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
[email protected]
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sergeantd
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