[CW] 80 meter activity

[N2EY@aol.com]

In a message dated 4/21/04 11:06:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
scottamcmullen@yahoo.com writes:


> i'm curious if anyone can tell me when (and why) 
> they shifted the novice band down 25 khz. when i was 
> a novice, and i know up through the mid 80's, the
> novice segment was 3700-3750 khz. now it's 3675-3725
> khz. and there is an slim, 25 khz cw sliver from
> 3725-3750 khz that the fcc is proposing to reallocate
> to phone. i'm mystified how anyone could not forsee
> that an isolated 25 khz sliver of cw bandspace in the
> middle of 80m wouldn't be underutilized. did they
> expect that this segment would be used for digital
> modes? that would actually be a reasonable place for
> it, instead of around 3580 khz.
> 

To understand all this you have to look at the history, going back several 
decades.

For most of ham radio history, US hams were the most numerous. Except for the 
Japanese 4th class licenses, the number of US hams is about equal to the rest 
of the world combined. And because of American affluence and 
industrialization, high power 'phone ham stations are/were most numerous in the USA.

For this and other reasons, it was decided long ago that the US 'phone bands 
would be kept narrower than those allocated to DX, so the DX 'phones would 
have someplace to work each other without having to deal with US QRM. For 
example, when I was a Novice in 1967, the US 'phone/image subband was 3800-4000, and 
the Canadian phone/image subband was 3725-4000. The Novice subband back then 
was 3700-3750, and so we sometimes had VE 'phone QRM in the top half. In 
practice, 3750-3800 was full of non-US 'phone operation. Working "split" is nothing 
new; "phone DXers were doing it 50+ years ago.

As the number of US hams has grown, the 'phone/image subbands have been 
widened, and the non-US hams have moved down accordingly. Most other countries 
nowadays don't have subbands-by-mode at all; they just go wherever they want. 
Hopefully that won't happen here.

73 de Jim, N2EY




--- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
multipart/alternative
  text/plain (text body -- kept)
  text/html
The reason this message is shown is because the post was in HTML
or had an attachment.  Attachments are not allowed.  To learn how
to post in Plain-Text go to: http://www.expita.com/nomime.html  ---