[160m] N2XE Beacon On Now! 3545.5 KHz, 12mW

[Tom Rauch]

My conclusion?  The best miles/watt will occur with a very
close antenna.  Like < 1 mile away.  Then stuff lots of
attenuation into the mix and you will have your 2,000,000
miles / watt.  A quick test between the beverage and the
transmit antenna is that I can easily copy a -60dBm signal.
They are 200 ft apart.  Thats 37,878,788 miles/watt...

What does it all mean?>>>

Nothing Ford, so far as miles per watt goes. What you say is
correct. A shorter path or fewer hops produces more miles
per watt. It is a seriously flawed "record" system to the
point of being meaningless, as you point out.

It is interesting to see how far very low power can be
heard. The distance part when all stations receive the same
transmitter (assuming propagation is the same and the
antenna has equal ERP in all directions) has some meaning.
The problem is propagation is not the same, and beacon
antennas probably aren't very often good or omni
directional.

It is also interesting to observe the effect people call
"spotlight" propagation on the very low power 80 meter
signal. I listened for about one hour, and had a Q5 strong
peak of about 8 minutes total. I had about 50 minutes of
near-the-noise copy.

Now if I was describing a DX station's signal, we'd all be
pontificating how a "spotlight" magically occured because of
ionized clouds blocking or aiding a path and moving around,
how ducts released the signal so it landed on my QTH, or
whatever particular thing we want to believe in. We often
invent scientific explainations of how a signal gets from
point A to point B without people at point C hearing it,
when we actually have no evidence at all what is really
going on up in the sky!

What would be really interesting would be for several of us
to log the times we heard the beacon peak, and describe the
characteristics of the peak. Assuming we wanted to give up
listening for DX long enough to compile a decent strength
log.

73 Tom