Regional FM DX

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Regional FM DX

Postby jon » Wed Jul 21, 2010 11:12 am

Surprised to hear Lloydminster from Edmonton for the first time this morning. CKSA-FM.

Looking at a map, the distance by air is not much greater than to Red Deer, which I hear fairly often, but the terrain is less signal-friendly.
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Re: Regional FM DX

Postby skyvalleyradio » Wed Jul 21, 2010 7:31 pm

sounds like tropospheric enhancement to me, jon. Mornings the air aloft is more heated than the air near the ground creating the ducting effect I explained a while back. Ditto late evenings At the point where the warmer air clashes with the cooler air, ions are formed and this creates the ducting layer which 'bends' the signal over the horizon, allowing FM and TV signals to be received where not normally heard/seen. Generally, late spring and early fall are the best times of year to be on the lookout for tropospheric propagation - days can be quite hot while early mornings and late evenings tend to be cool.
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Re: Regional FM DX

Postby Anotherwpgguy » Thu Jul 22, 2010 5:10 am

One time when I was flying and on descent into Prince Albert, SK, I was on PA's frequency (122.2 Mhz) and suddenly heard several other aircraft in the circuit at ... I think, Red Deer. They weren't heard at higher altitude, but very clearly within a few hundred foot layer of airspace. Descending below that layer caused loss of signal, and the ground station wasn't hearing any of the Red Deer transmissions.

I climbed back up into the layer again, and talked to the other aircraft for a few moments. PA to Red Deer on roughly 15 watts AM VHF was a fairly neat trick I thought.

An excellent example of tropo propagation due to an inversion, and it was interesting to be able to fly into and out of the duct vertically.

When I was in Houston, TX one time with my ham radio 2 meter hand-held, I met a couple of radio station guys who worked doing traffic reports for one of the big AM talk stations. They were both avid VHF DX'ers, and regularly worked tropo by watching the weather forecast for cold fronts to lay over Houston, and aim their antennas along the length of the cold front to take advantage of the temperature inversion at the time of frontal passage....which I thought was slick.

An example of Sporatic E happened one summer day maybe 10 years ago, when I hit the scan button in the car and to my surprise was an unexpected single signal that sounded like a local. Turned out to be WSB-FM Atlanta, GA. Not a bad hop from YWG! I grabbed my GE Super Radio 3, and put it on a table in the living room and WSM-FM (and no other stations) pounded in for several hours. By the way, its a stucco house, so getting a weak VHF signal into the home can be problematic due to the Farraday Cage effect of the metal screening under the stucco.

Cheers folks.

73 de
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Re: Regional FM DX

Postby PMC » Sat Jul 31, 2010 11:09 pm

Anotherwpgguy wrote: By the way, its a stucco house, so getting a weak VHF signal into the home can be problematic due to the Farraday Cage effect of the metal screening under the stucco.


Problematic for VHF, but great for your `office' security, when using computers. :towel:
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Re: Regional FM DX

Postby Hallicrafters » Sun Aug 01, 2010 8:29 am

I can remember as a kid we lived 50 miles from channel 2 in Detroit. One spring, channel 2 disappeared, KUTV Salt lake came in like a local.

One other "event" I was working CFTR on a summer Sunday, we received a call from WAPA San Juan, we were overriding their in house station monitor. A line of strong thunderstorms may have been the culprit.

We also had a crazy engineer (Tom Hoar) who (without managements knowledge) loved to go out to the TX and turn up the modulation, till Massina New York phoned, they couldn't hear their station in their own control room. Ted later bought the station, when told "hey your Canadian you can't own this" he said "fine then it goes off".
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