[PaQSO] Bands

[jbudzowski at peoplepc.com]

   Yep, K3YD has it right. The ones who say that there is a vast untapped
PAQ resource on the VHF bands don't know what they are talking about. A
couple of years ago we tried to run a REPEATER contest in Lawrence County in
an effort to get the lcoal vhfer's interested in contesting, what a flop
that was! With all the ops on 2m and 440, I bet you would be lucky to scare
up less than a handful of contacts. Who in their right minds would bother
going thru all the trouble to drag vhf contesting stuff out in the field for
such meager pickings, when even the bands above 20m look like wastelands to
the PAQer? 'dqu

Message: 3
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2005 11:54:55 EDT
From: K3YD at aol.com
Subject: Re: [PaQSO] Bands
To: paqso at mailman.qth.net
Message-ID: <bd.62cdb21b.308917cf at aol.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

A few thoughts about the use of VHF/UHF bands.

Last year ('04) I operated with the N3GWR M/M group.  Location was a rural
hillside in SE Berks county.  This is at a location which allows UHF TV
reception from Delaware, FM broadcast & VHF-TV out of Tidewater (Norfolk
area), VA.
We expected to have very good coverage of the counties of greater Phila, DE,
MD, SNJ and perhaps VA.

We operated at the 100 watt level on 6, 2, and 440, in SSB/FM and had 6 or 7
QSO's, total, on those 3 bands.  Our conclusion was that the effort to
install
the antennas was not rewarded.  Perhaps a major VHF contest station (KW,
beams at 80', etc.) would have better results?

Allow the use of these bands?  Absolutely!  Expect much from them?  Not in
our experience.  Your results may vary.

73,  Blair K3YD