by 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
Anotherwpgguy