[Lowfer] Little PSK coming up to JD on 74.322...

[JD]

That is an excellent article, Jay, along with its predecessor at John's 
site.  Should be most helpful.

The main object of today's test was to kind of stretch folks' thinking about 
the daytime possibilities of LF.  The emphasis at 2200 and 4000 m has long 
been nighttime DX...and at this time of year, especially the Atlantic Coast 
guys to Europe and the Pacific Coast guys to Japan.  This is natural and 
worthwhile and rewarding, and I have no doubt it will lend itself to 
continued accomplishments for many years.

The side effect, though, is that there has been only minimal attention to 
the daytime characteristics of these two bands.  It also tends to leave a 
gap in the middle of the country where it's already hard to generate 
interest in LF, since transoceanic opportunities are much more rare here. 
Bob and I went into today's demonstration knowing that the modes we had 
mutually available were not ideal for consistent communication, but given 
how reliable his signal has been here (especially at 74 kHz), we wanted to 
see just how far outside the box we could go* with a mode that's mainly 
thought of in connection with HF bands, and still see results.

Bottom line, it was very gratifying to see keyboard-speed text arriving via 
almost 1030 miles of groundwave with 1 watt ERP.  I was pretty confident his 
signal was up to the task, but it was still a welcome sight to see it 
actually happening.  Makes me curious how slow we'd have to go to get 
reliable copy that could, for instance, then be relayed another thousand 
miles, and so on.  Just another fun opportunity to experiment and explore. 
Many thanks to Bob for his generous cooperation!

73
John D

(*We even seriously considered AMTOR/Navtex, but during the testing 
concluded that we'd need more signal or less noise. Maybe after dark some 
time when XRS4 or XEB is already lighting up the night sky.<g>)