[Lowfer] Re: Last Season for Lowfers?

[James Moritz]

Dear Lowfers,

At 04:01 09/07/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>1. With thousands of US hams having access to the band, with Japanese 
>companies
>begin to include this band in their rigs next year?

Experience over here shows that a station running 100W into a reasonably 
good back-garden antenna and using CW or other conventional HF-type modes 
can expect to work up to a few hundred miles fairly reliably, and 
occasionally further under unusually good conditions. With 100W power 
limit, greater distances either require big antennas or specialized 
weak-signal modes and equipment. For many stations, any type of LF 
operation is extremely difficult due to man-made noise, and any station 
will be severely limited for a considerable proportion of the time by 
atmospheric QRN

It seems to me that hams divide roughly into 2 categories, the "amateur 
communicator" type that is primarily interested in DXing, nets, chatting 
with friends on the radio, etc, and the "radio experimenter" who likes to 
play around with circuits, antennas, propagation, etc. The former type are 
the vast majority of amateurs, but are less likely to be interested in LF 
because it involves a great deal of hassle to get very limited 
communications capability compared to HF or VHF. In Europe, most LF 
amateurs are in the latter category, so it seems LF will stay a minority 
pursuit amongst hams.

After some years of LF in Europe, the number of hams regularly active on LF 
is probably less than 100. Quite a lot of amateur rigs already have usable 
receive capability for LF of course - the problem with LF TX capability is 
that it would mean adding another decade or so of bandwidth to the PA, 
requiring big transformers and capacitors, and making it difficult to 
maintain the performance at HF and above. For Messrs. Yaesu and the rest to 
be interested in going to all that trouble, they would have to be sure of 
selling quite a few thousand rigs with LF capability. I would be very 
surprised if the next few years saw thousands of US amateurs operating on 
136 with black box rigs, but you never know.

Cheers, Jim Moritz
73 de M0BMU