[NLRS] Winipeg to Minneapolis 10GHz !

[Chris Cox]

Good morning, Donn.

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Donn Baker wrote:
> I'd be interesting hearing about the doppler... how severe was it ?  The
> books say it shouldn't have been too bad, but what did reality say ?
It was quite interesting, actually.

I stopped over at the Burnsville Parkway overlook just before 0100Z and 
caught the tail end of the event.

Barry's signal was somewhat distorted, akin to CW Au on 50MHz where there 
was still a goodly amount of pure tone audible through the "shh".  This 
was obviously forward scatter.  Listening to John, 'FQA, and Gary, 'GHZ, 
via backscatter presented no audible CW tone, only the typical Au quality 
most common on 144MHz and up.  Doppler offset from the centre frequency 
was virtually non-existant - the signal was simply spread over a few kHz 
around the nominal frequency.

It is possible that the difference in quality of Barry's signal relative 
to John and Gary was also partially due to forward troposcatter rather 
than the auroral-sounding rain-scatter.  Too little experience to say for 
sure.

Excellent fun regardless!

 > 
> Does anyone have a radar picture of the N Minnesoata area (Grand Forks
> radar, or MSP radar on long range scan) for the time of the QSO ?  It would
> be nice to have  to see what the storms were....

I am sure there is an archive somewhere that may contain an image.  When 
Jon and Barry initially made contact, there was a reasonable storm present 
centred just to the east of Bemidji.  There was also a much larger and 
visibly more intense storm system present to the north of the path 
covering a large north-south area, but fairly narrow east-west area.  This 
appeared to be centred over International Falls.  Given the beam headings 
used at each end of the link, I think it unlikely that this larger system 
was used for the contact.  Given it's significantly larger size it may 
have worked as well or better than the Bemidji system.  However, it also 
may have been too far to the North of MSP and/or East of WPG.

-- 
73  Chris Cox  N0UK, G4JEC, ex-AB0CN, ex-G8PTC  RNARS #1157  EN34jv

chrisc@Chris.Org        Ping Jockey's do it until they HEAR the burn...
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