[AK-VHF] ak-vhf Digest, Vol 77, Issue 6

[Brandon Clark]

Hi Shannon,
Yep, an inversion would make things warmer at altitude and colder at ground
level, so that's probably what you experienced. I'm not sure if it takes
more than an inversion to get that waveguide action at VHF+ so I'll have to
look into that.

Bouncing the signal off McKinney makes sense. In SoCal there was a group
that did transmitter hunts regularly. They talked about using a yagi
antenna on the fox and aiming the antenna at the mountains during the snow
season. Guys would pick up the fox in the direction of the mountains and go
off on a wild goose chase until they realized the signal was bouncing off
the snow.
Brandon



On Mar 16, 2018 21:56, "Shannon Methe" <shannonmethe at gmail.com> wrote:

Lot of good stuff in your response here, Brandon.

In regards to inversion, I’ve experienced from up on Flat Top. If I
remember correctly, it was much warmer up high than in the town below. (May
have been the opposite; memory fails me here.) I had difficulty with the
local stations but I got a station way down on the peninsula (Kasilof) 5x9.
It was as though signals were caught up high and just bounced around up
there until they came out someplace else. It’s only happened once, though.

Others here know more about the Fairbanks - Anchorage VHF connection than I
do, but I’ve been told the ham who did it lived above the Flat Top parking
lot (there is a private neighborhood up there; DON’T go up there; the one
guy is really territorial - threatened to call the police on me and report
me as a sexual predator. True story.) anyway that ham was way high up and
had a lot of power and I believe he was actually bouncing his signal off
Mt. McKinley. That’s how I heard the story anyway. I’ll bet Ed tells it
better than me.

-Shannon
> On Mar 16, 2018, at 7:05 PM, Brandon Clark <kl7bsc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ed and Shannon,
>
> Thus is an interesting thread, and echoes a lot of what I've learned in my
> few years of VHF/UHF radio work. With this kind of work factors you
> wouldn't notice at HF become very significant, such as adding a few more
> elements, getting ten feet hiher up, or adding a few more watts.
>
> An interesting project would be to get everyone on the Tuesday and
Saturday
> nets to log all the contact they can hear, and then list their antenna,
> location, and power on the log sheet. That could then be fed into a Google
> earth map showing station locations as pins on the maps, lines as good
> signal paths, and the color of the lines representing the combined "oomph"
> of the stations (combined antenna gain and Tx power f9rnthe stations in
> contact). After a month or two, and with a few mobile stations to try out
> less used locations, you would have a map of the VHF/UHF signal paths for
> south centrsl alaska. Coukd be handy for emcom and contest planning.
>
> It's also interesting that the subject of propagation keeps coming up.
I've
> noticed recurring temperature inversions and low cloud activity since I
> moved here in Dec. I wonder if there may be some waveguide action going on
> in the area. In CA guys would wait for the right weather, drive up to the
> right elevation duringnan inversion, and then been out to Hawaii on VHF
> through the GHz bands, using these specific weather patterns as
waveguides.
> Might be happening here too.
> Brandon
>
> PS: Anchorage to Fairbanks at VHF? What bands, how much power, and from
> where? Definitely need to incorporate that possibility into my roving
plans.
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