I’ll second Mike’s motion of fascinating, including Bob’s perspective on relative SNR between captures by Hartmut, Henny and Mike.

On long-term average one might expect a path loss of a dB or so between QTHs of Mike and Henny (for a signal originating from Bob’s QTH), and a path loss of 3 dB or so between QTHs of Mike and Hartmut (for a signal originating from Bob’s QTH). I eyeballed SNRs from 3 nights’ captures between October 13^th and last night, and on two of those nights, relative SNRs between the RX QTHs are not inconsistent with the above (give or take a few dB, and with some indication of a system SNR advantage at Mike’s RX). But last night, if my subjective reading of the grabber plots is in the ballpark, max and average SNR at Mike’s RX may have been up to 10dB above max and average SNR at QTHs of Hartmut and Henny. In other words, the differences (a-b, b-c, c-a, see following)  between the overnight average SNRs (for periods of readability) at QTHs of  (a) Mike, (b) Henny and (c) Hartmut may have varied by perhaps as much as (5dB?) over 3 nights’ captures between October 13^th and last night; and the difference between the overnight max SNRs (for a few characters) at QTHs of Mike, Henny and Hartmut may have varied by perhaps as much as (7dB?) over 3 nights’ captures between October 13^th and last night.

For this T/A path distance, modal reinforcement/cancellation shouldn’t be huge, but I wonder:

a)      Could it be a contributor to the above?

b)      Could cross-polarized RX antennas help to even things out over distance and time in this case?

I use loop RX antennas in my AZ QTH as cultural noise in the desert is not a big problem; and these are easy to cross-polarize. Are loop RX antennas not used for cultural noise reasons in most of the RX equipment in this group?

Regards,

Jim

AA5BW