Hello Group,
we had two nice days at the hamfest of Novegro, near Milano.
Firstly, the weather was good, sunny, not even too cold, about
7 - 8 degrees Celsius. Lot of people at the fair, and to our boot.
We were side by side with those demonstrating the first commercial
version of the EH antenna, so many of the visitors, after having
heard how well it performed, and how it generates the Poynting
vector, blatantly defying a couple of Maxwell equations, then
came to us asking what those funny shapes on the screen stood
for. "Is it PSK31 ?" - "No sir, it is a way of communicating on the
LF using very slow CW, with dot length of 3 seconds and more,
up to 60" - "Oh, I see.... but why so ? Even Marconi, when he sent
his famous three dots, used a faster speed..."
At this point, we had two choices : convincing him that he was the
perfect buyer for the EH antenna, and that he could not do without one,
or starting a long and boring explanation about S/N ratios, frequency
analysis, time and resolution dualism, etc.
We used one or the other approach after having "smelled" a little who
we had in front of us. We hope to have in the two days gained a few
new adepts for the "under the noise" world. Time will tell....
The QRN was tremendous... Friday afternoon Claudio IK2PII had
installed a loop outside the fair building, in the open, and he told me
that evening that the noise level was quite acceptable.
Not so on Saturday and Sunday... with hundreds of PCs and monitors
switched on, we were unable to copy Giulio IK2DED, who transmitted
with 100W from his QTH less than 100km away. So it is remarkable
that we copied, Saturday with T report and Sunday with M- report,
Laurie G3AQC ! We copied also Valerio IK5ZPV, but his QRO
station usually produces an aurally copyable signal at my QTH.
To put an end to this long message, we are satisfied of the affluence,
and we thank Laurie, Jim, Wolf, Valerio, Cesare, Giulio and in general
all those who put a signal on the air during the weekend.
73 Alberto I2PHD
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