[AMRadio] G8NOF on 15m

[Donald Chester]

"Bry Carling" <bcarling at cfl.rr.com wrote:

<<Jay - a lot of USA ops run AM on 7140 X 3 = 21.420 kHz because of an
abundance of crystals available for that frequency. You might listen there
too, from time to time.

I have sold dozens of crystals on 7140 over the past 3 years.>>


Maybe that would be a good AM frequency for 40m. It seems the AM community
lost interest in the old AM frequency of 7160 once the novelty wore off
following the broadcasters vacating 7100-7200, but if there are that many
7140 xtals out there, maybe they could be pressed into service on their
fundamental frequency as well.

I have been active on the 7190 frequency in the evenings recently, but it
gets crowded and there is nearly always someone in the large roundtable who
is unreadable here because of the skip zone on the band. I usually wait
until after 0300 GMT, when activity is winding  down, since  many of
to-day's AM ops are not night-owls as in yesteryear, and have had some very
nice QSOs between 0300 and 0400. At 0358Z a very  strong and irritating BC
station fires up on 7295, and its LSB wipes out 7290. A few times we have
QSYed to 7285 and carried on for another hour, but another broadcaster fires
up on that frequency at 0500 GMT. After 0500Z, it often works to QSY down to
7260 plus or minus QRM, although you may have to dodge slopbucket activity.
In any case, the BC activity in that part of the band seems less severe than
it was just a  few years ago. I  suspect shortwave broadcasting is going the
way of pay phones, land line telephones and video cassette tapes, so maybe
more of the band will open up to amateur operation in years to come.

There is enough vacant room on 40m right now to have more one-on-one AM
QSOs, anywhere in the US phone band. But still, we do need to have the phone
band expanded at least down to 7100, since 7060-7125 is at best sparsely
populated even  when the rest of the band is highly congested with multiple
QuaRMtests.

Don k4kyv