[600MRG] Ground Wave Propo

[Claude Baker]

I spent a year on Easter Island in '68-'69 and regularly listened to KSFO in San Francisco, a distance of 4500 miles. KSFO is a 5 KW station at 560 KHz and provided a nice clear signal. The reception was such that I didn't hope to hear the station, I expected to hear it.

As a MARS operator, I had conversations on the ham bands from Russia, to Thailand, to Africa, to the Antacartic, to MacQuarie Island (SW of NZ) and of course the U.S. and South America. 

Sitting on or in an ocean does wondrous things for propagation.



 
Claude Baker, AC0ZL 




On Monday, January 6, 2014 1:14 PM, Kenneth G. Gordon <kgordon2006 at frontier.com> wrote:
 
Here is a quote from Jeff Herman's article concerning propagation on 600 
meters.

"Regardless of whether it was by accident or choice, what was handed 
down to us was a wavelength with excellent evening propagation.

Starting at about 2100 local 500 Kc. would come alive. Any ship or shore 
station within 3000-4000 miles could be heard by an excellent 
combination of ground wave and sky wave - nothing was missed within 
this radius! Shore stations of more than 5000 miles were easily copied 
(Australia and New Zealand boomed in nightly). Daytime propagation 
consisted of only ground wave: 300-500 miles was the maximum range 
possible. Thus most daytime traffic was passed on the HF channels."

And this:

"Late nights could become a bit of a bore for some shore ops, heavy 
eyelids and such. So out of boredom (or maybe by ``accident'') a single dit 
would ring across the Pacific, only to be answered by another dit possibly 
several thousands of miles away. Then all hell would break loose: every 
shore station and any ships with an on-duty op would be sending dits! For 
several seconds 500 sounded like a machine gun - 100 or more carriers 
were ditting away. As quickly as it started it would fade away.

A variation of this was someone sending a single GE (good evening); of 
course it would be impolite not to respond in kind so someone else would 
answer with GE. Within a half second at least one hundred GE's would 
flood the frequency! My log entry would look like this:

GE / GE / GE / GE / GE / (OPNOTE: AT LEAST 100 GE'S SENT) 500 
1123Z "


Kenneth G. Gordon W7EKB

"Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway."--- John  
Wayne



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