Has there ever been talk about holding some kind of “event” that would encourage S2S contacts, especially trans-atlantic S2S? Perhaps this could be a 2-hour time period (1700-1900Z?) held in the summer when both europe and west coast USA were in daylight, with stations congregating in a designated segment of the 20M-15M cw/ssb bands so they could find each other.
Those events are day long and essentially encourage chasers. I’m talking about a shorter duration activators event that intentionally encourages S2S, including trans-atlantic S2S.
If not its own event, perhaps it could take the form of a short duration rally within the context of the International and NA SOTA days.
Thank you for our QSO recently on 15m, it really made my day along with the QSO with Rich, N4EX. Your signal was FB.
I like your idea, I think it would be cool to try.
Weekends would be best I think like Mike 2E0YYY suggests. Would it be best to have separate timings for CW and SSB, that way everyone gets a fair chance for a QSO.
Should I start building a capable rig for 15m? (my FT817 is not good without a filter!)
My VHF fanatic buddies have been busy sending messages about the great conditions on 6m and above, so I guess HF will have taken a bit of a beating! I guess conditions should be pretty good when the ionosphere starts to settle down again.
After the big radio blackouts in September conditions on 20m during the night time were fantastic. I worked a guy in Maine USA with 300mW to a portable vertical antenna mounted on a caravan!
Just got back from W1/MB-009 and 15M worked like gang busters at 2000Z to EU, at least 2 S-units better than 20M per G4ELZ and DJ5AV’s signals.
Any way you cut it, it is tough to hear a 5W transatlantic ssb signal using the typical SOTA antenna to receive on (versus yagi at home). If condx were unusually good, maybe. But I’d still be game to try. CW would be MUCH easier and could really be an exciting event if we had 10+ stations on each side of the pond.
Yep, the cw operators will certainly have the edge on this challenge. Seems, I may have to drag the Antron-99 out of retirement. The thought of dragging it up G/SP-004 with 32Ah of SLABs is beginning to depress me already
the cw operators will certainly have the edge on this
Conservatively speaking the SNR improvement of CW over SSB is in the order of 15-17dB. So for an SSB station to get the same SNR of a CW station using an 817 as a TX they would need to run:
5W + 16dB = 5 x 39.8 = 199W
Now of course 5W SSB stations work surprisingly well on the HF bands but that shows the advantage CW has and hence its popularity.
So an SSB op needs a PA+batteries or 15-17db of antenna gain and that would mean say a 17 to 20 ele Yagi for 15m. Something which would be quite big and difficult to manage single handed
Of course 10m may be open in which case trivial antennas and a few watts of SSB will do easily. I’ll rely on the key and my 300Hz filter rather than the ionosphere playing ball!