I was monitoring last night on 135923 Hz.
First of all there was a great deal of static and it lasted
pretty much through the evening, so conditions were poor here
for receiving weak signals from across the pond.
I did notice two faint lines which I thought might be Laurie
and Jim - but hard to confirm this because I don't know their
exact frequencies. The lines both appeared early in the recording
session then faded away as the evening wore on.
Yesterday afternoon before I started monitoring 135923 I left
the machine running for a while on 138830 to see how DCF39 was
doing. Their signal peaked strongly for about an hour between
1930 and 2030 - that's mid afternoon here.
There is a small (10K) GIF attached to this message which shows
how strongly DCF39 came up out of the noise here yesterday afternoon.
If it gets through the reflector the filename is DCF39.GIF.
It looks like the best time to receive signals from North America is
around local dawn in Europe. That's when the path is still in darkness
but it's already light towards the East, so noise from that direction
is reduced. On the other hand, the best time for North American stations
to receive European transmissions seems to be just before darkness in
our time zone - when most of the path is already in darkness but we
still have low noise levels because we're not yet receiving much to
the west of us.
With this in mind, to complete a 2-way QSO would it not be prudent to
have the European end transmit from say 1930 to 2030 and have the
Canadian end transmit from 0630 to 0730 UTC? I don't know if there
is any limit for how much time can elapse between transmissions at
either end to qualify as a bona fide 2-way QSO? I would hope some
allowance would be made for this unusual band. I'd say that as long
as call signs and signal reports are exchanged on the same day it
should qualify as a 2-way, hi!
73 de Bill VE2IQ
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