A few points:
Since its early days, amateur radio has been a broad pasture. Before the
Second World War the RSGB had two main sections: Experimenters, and Transmitter
& Relay (T&R), which reflected some of the diversity of the hobby. The Irish
government still describes amateur radio licensees as "Experimenters".
Mal is, and should be, free to pursue the aspects of amateur radio that
interest him, and I look forward to congratulating him when he achieves DXCC on
136 kHz. However, I suggest he does not have a moral entitlement to denigrate
the activities of those who wish to conduct what my UK licence describes as
"technical investigations". I think he is also in error in suggesting that the
600 m allocation is part of the amateur service. Permits have been issued in
several countries (sadly not yet in France) for people to conduct experiments
in this part of the spectrum. A similar situation exists regarding the 60 m
permits issued in the UK - but in both cases, although the recipients of the
permits are radio amateurs, the frequencies in question are not allocated to
the amateur service.
As to the suggestion that it has all been done before, I would point out that
the information that is now of interest may either never have been recorded, or
got lost. When I first became interested in LF, I searched the technical
library at BTRL for anything that might be of interest. I found relatively
little, and nothing recent. What there was mostly dealt with the mature
technology of high power land stations with large antennas. This is a totally
different scenario from the average experimenter's situation and it is very
much to the credit of the latter that much of their work is published in
widely-available places.
Other services can benefit from the results of our experiments. For example,
it became evident some years ago that a new cave radio design was required as
the existing widely-used one (the Molefone) was no longer manufactured and the
rescue organisations could see problems looming. What was finally settled on
was based on an HF SSB transceiver by John Hey, G3TDZ. Field tests on the
prototype were carried out, above and below ground, by amateurs holding permits
for 73 kHz, before finalising the design for the cave radio frequency of 87 kHz.
To sum up, by all means plough your own furrow, but let others plough theirs
and remember: we have to justify our presence on the band.
73
John Rabson
Radio F5VLF
58800 Cervon
France
JN17vg
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