[Elecraft] One-Way Propagation?

[Geoffrey Mackenzie-Kennedy]

Jeff, as Kevin says 'you will find odd occurrences', and so called 'One Way 
skip' does occur probably more often than people used to believe. There are 
several explanations as to how this could take place which are too lengthy 
to discuss on the Reflector, but one thing is for certain which is that the 
more people find out about "Propagation", the less we really know! As Kevin 
says the ionospheric layers are usually oddly shaped and constantly in a 
state of flux and do not resemble those squeaky clean things seen in many 
text books. To add to the mix layers within a layer will quite often appear 
at some time of the day centred over one or more places on the planet. Out 
of this confusion it is possible to find the path that a signal might follow 
from A to B, and why a signal from B to A might start off using the same 
path back to A but is refelected to another path back to earth and is not 
heard at A, but might be heard somewhere near A. This is part of the story!

73,
Geoff
GM4ESD

On Friday, December 01, 2006 3:17 AM, Kevin KD5ONS wrote:

> Howdy Jeff,
>    If you get on 20 meters in the morning, while you are in the early 
> morning hours and the operator with whom you are working is in an area 
> later in the day, you will find some odd occurrences.  Some days you hear 
> better than the other op and some days it is the reverse.  The ionosphere 
> is not a perfectly spherical reflector.  From empirical evidence I have 
> found it to be quite oddly shaped indeed.  Think of the layer you're 
> bouncing your signals off as a boiling layer where the surface changes 
> direction rapidly.
<snip>
>    As far as being truly one way?  Occasionally I hear ops extremely well 
> but they cannot hear me.  I hope it is not that they are ignoring me but 
> simply cannot hear me.  This is what I call one-way propagation.

> > On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:05:12 -0800, Jeff <wb5gwb at optonline.net> wrote:

>> Is there really such a thing as one-way ionospheric propagation?  My 
>> intuition says no, but I don't have the physics knowledge to back it  up. 
>> On the other hand, sometimes it sure seems that stations who ought  to be 
>> able to hear my QRP signal cannot.