This week was the week to try a bit of Antipodean chasing. Ben @GW4BML was in VK and ZL, kindly posting alerts with support from @VK3ARR and @ZL1THH. Now that was worth a summit chase….
It deserved a high peak like GW/SW-001 Pen y Fan and that was the plan. Until I realised that this was going to be really difficult at the planned times:
23z on Monday: Very unlikely to be propagation and
17z on Thursday: no chance to escape work so early to climb a big hill
So it was another trip up my favourite ‘local’ Beacon Batch G/SC-003 for midnight coffee on Monday and sunset on Thursday:
Monday at 23z as expected, every band bar 40m was dead. And 40m was full of US activity with quite a few hams discussing the Trump inauguration
Thursday was a different story with 20m and 10m in really good conditions, with lots of great contacts and summits from
Carlos @PY2VM on 10m in Brazil on PY2/SE-026 and @KC2WLM on 10m in Maine W2/GA-297
And the prized 11,433 mile SSB summit to summit with ZL on 20m!
On HF? Yes. You can work yourself with round-the-world echoes on the higher HF bands. I estimate I’ve heard my own signal do 125000 to 175000 miles (5 to 7 loops). Works best with rigs with QSK. This last year I worked Victor GI4ONL on 10m CW but it was a mix of short and long path and round-the-world echoes. It was challenging to copy the signal amongst the echoes. The distance was 85miles direct with the first echo distance being 24774miles.
However, I’ll agree that’s contrived. Your distance is getting on for about the max you can do from the UK without being able to prove long or short path. The antipodal point to the UK, and thus the longest path you can work without knowing short or long is in the Pacific ISTR, so there’s unlikely to be another ham there!
It’s good fun this specific path working. “I shoot an arrow in the air. Wither it lands I know not where” is a fine description of a lot of ham radio and specifically SOTA. We tend to use omni antennas or maybe low dipoles which are quite omnidirectional so we fire RF out and work the random callers. And we’re happy with that. It’s much harder doing specific paths like EU<>NA West coast. It’s not just the possible site choice and antenna choice but also getting everyone up a hill when you’d much rather be home in bed. Or at least sat in front of the fire with a large whisky.
Hams have been working G<VK/ZL paths for a long time but normally from home with beams etc. just a case of right band at the right time. So doing S2S with possibly one end QRP and simple antennas is always much, much more satisfying especially when you’re out in poor light etc. You should treat yourself to some custard to celebrate. Shadow doesn’t look so impressed though.
ZL3/SL-329 looks like the antipodal summit for the UK. Any ZL3 summit is close. For me it would be a peak on the Azores. I think my longest path for S2S was into Spain - it’s further than any in the UK.
What I forgot to say is the DB does all the S2S calcs on the fly. So if you ask to see your S2S log it finds the S2S QSOs (easy) and for each one works the distance and displays it. That takes uS to calculate per QSO which is negligible compared to the lookup times and generating the webpage view so saves lots of storage space. That’s why we do it like that.
What doesn’t exist is a simple way to query the S2S tables in the DB and calculate all the S2S distances. It involves a lot of table scanning which is slow and expensive so we don’t do it.
Well as it’s you I had a quick look I started with this Antipodes map to see likely places that could support long S2S distances. What I’d never considered was that most of the North American continent doesn’t have a land mass antipodal point. Means I can ignore lots of QSOs !
I have not done an EXHAUSTIVE search but maybe there will be some Japan/Korea to Brazil/Argentina/Chile QSOs in the same range.
n.b. I’ve not verified my SQL so it could be “lacking its custard”
i.e. inaccurate or full of bugs.
A look through the logs of likely G/GM types shows plenty of S2S distances in the 16900->17400 km range.
Look at the actual S2S QSOs for the person involved… you can change the callsign in the URL to select others quickly. Then use the date drop-down to select a time frame.
If people want to look for maximum length S2S distances, EI / ZL9 Campbell Islands looks good as does GM (Orkney) / VKM (Macquarie Island).
I spotted that and ran an EA / ZL S2S check. None logged so far. EA7 around Marbella to ZL1/WK is probably the easiest to arrange as both are mainland summits unlike getting islands like ZL9.
I thought there would be many more. That’s why I still suspect bugs in the SQL or maybe some S2S QSOs have not been logged.
He wasn’t. Faffing on Beacon Batch mean’t he was 2 hours later for his dinner. He was pretty upset I hadn’t considered this and I wouldn’t be surprised if you get a formal complaint…
Hi Tim,
Bravo Tim for the S2S link last night with Ben.
I contacted Ben on 20m a few minutes before you then 1/2 hour later on 15m, with an S of 5 on both bands. For me it was a short path. But there is little difference in distance between the short and long path… not the propagation !
73, Regards,
Chris F4WBN
Well - you got me out of bed to see what my longest distances were (never knew SOTAData showed distances!).
ZL antipodes shown on a map of Europe. Ignore the pin - it’s just the centre of ZL. Courtesy of https ://www.geodatos.net/en/antipodes/new-zealand
@EI9KY takes the prize for me. Like Ben and Tim’s this was a pre-arranged S2S which makes it feel more like a joint-effort achievement than the lottery win of an unexpected S2S.
My home QTH antipode is in the sea between Portugal and Ireland, so I can probably only marginally improve on this.