Fishing and Surfing
Mar 8th, 2010 by dave
Last weekend was the ARRL International DX SSB contest. It was great to see the HF bands returning to better propagation after the long, long sunspot minimum we’ve had. We can now wave to the minimum in the rearview mirror once and for all. Good riddance!
As per usual, I worked maybe 30 or so DX stations just for the fun of it. Most were from my HF rig in the car. I use a Yaesu FT-857D with the Yaesu ATAS-120A screwdriver antenna for HF. I have a separate dual-band Diamond antenna for 2 meters and 70 cm. I keep thinking about putting my 500 watt amp in the car, but I’d have to totally move away from the ATAS because it won’t handle the extra power, and I hate to lose the great integration it has with the FT-857. It’s just so easy to push “Tune” on the radio when you change bands or move very far within a single band to retune it. You can truthfully do this while in motion, not taking your eyes off the road, and that’s a huge deal for me. So for now, I’m unresolved on this issue, but not moving ahead with the amp idea for awhile. I probably need to get serious about building a box that would drive my High Sierra HS-1800 antenna to fool the 857 into treating it just like the ATAS. There used to be a commercial box that would do this, but it’s out of production, with no viable replacements.
Anyway…during these contests, some magic sometimes happens on the various HF bands (by HF, I mean 3.5 to 29.7 MHz, also called the shortwave bands). The magic I’m referring to means unusual propagation “anomalies” that you ordinarily wouldn’t expect. Things just happen during contests that don’t happen as often otherwise. This usually means that there are cool band openings to areas or using frequencies not normally expected.
Case in point would be 10 meters on Saturday. Many hams are used to the fact that ordinarily dead bands–and 10 meters is the usual suspect–seem to magically come alive on contest weekends. There has been speculation that usually divides into two camps: one feels that the bands were open anyway, but with the large numbers of operators active all over the world, we just notice it more. The other camp offers the odd thought that maybe, just maybe, with all of those hundreds and thousands of watts of extra RF energy in the air, we are artificially ionizing the ionosphere, causing it to create propagation on 10 meters that wouldn’t exist otherwise. We are, they say, creating our own Sporadic-E conditions.
I’m much more a believer in the former theory–there are just more operators on the air, which serves to point out that there are more viable openings on normally quiet bands than there otherwise would be. I don’t generally subscribe to the theory that we can muck with the forces of nature to the degree that we can charge the upper atmosphere to any great degree, but I’ll be open to scientific approaches to the topic, should they ever happen.
I was driving around town, and thought about 10 meters, so I gave a listen. Sure enough, I heard some S2-S7 signals from Argentina on about 28.420 MHz. I was able to work them, as well as Brazil and then Hawaii–KH7XS seems to boom through on any band they pick. Nice operation!
This is very good to see non-summertime, non-Sporadic-E activity on 10. Non-Sporadic-E? Well, maybe it was E-skip after all. Hard to tell.
Anyway, listening around on 10 meters is a bit like fishing. You can’t count on the fish to be there and biting when you put your line in the water. One thing is guaranteed though: You will never get any fish if you don’t try.
As to the surfing metaphor, hams are very much like both fishermen and surfers. We enjoy the recreation of long-distance (DX) radio operations at the pleasure of old Sol, Mister Sun himself. Daily, as the sun rises and sets, we move from the lower frequencies onto the higher ones, experiencing the big sets on 20 meters and higher when the sun is high in the sky, and then moving back down to 40, 80 or 160 meters when it gets dark. We also stand on the shore, waiting years at times, for the really huge sets to come rolling in as the sunspots increase.
Looking out on the horizon, I see the first big sets, and feel a wave of pleasure at the thought of big surf!
