Here's about the situation we had this evening:
In fact, it was probably a bit worse than this, based on the propagation forecast in the previous post.
A couple of notes on the modeling. It was done using voacap.com, which is at best very approximate and represents average conditions for a given month and time of day. Based on experience from last winter's attempts over at Prepared Ham, the model results are usually closer to actual performance if you reduce the input watts by a factor of 10. Most of us are running 100w barefoot rigs, so I input 10w; the model automatically knocks this down another 20%. It's not that critical. Most of us are also running fairly low dipoles or other kinds of wire antennas, so I put in 10m height on each end.
Vulture mentioned in the chat room that he'd modeled things at 20m antenna height as well. Here are the same results, but with the antennas jacked up to 20m height:
That's a good bit better! But 20m – i.e., 65ft – takes some significant engineering. Truth be known, my antenna "towers" are based on 20' lengths of PVC pipe, and that's only 6m high. But 10m is the minimum setting in voacap, so that's what I went with.
PSK31 can boost performance by about 26 dB, but you need to back off on the power about 4x from SSB because of the duty cycle, so call it 20 dB, making it about the equivalent of CW. Moving the antennas back down to 10m height and modeling that gives:
That's a bit better, kind of in the range we need. Here's last winter's thread on PSK31:
http://thesurvivalpodcast.com/forum/index.php?topic=47785.0 For what it's worth, it doesn't take much hardware to do this.
I'm leaning toward trying a digital net, but I'm not sure how many people would be on board with it. That... and well, it's just more typing. It's good to hear voices directly. As tough as this is, I want to keep on trying SSB for a while. Maybe both? Maybe change the 1pm Sunday to PSK31? Thoughts?
