Hi Alan, I agree to a point, it depends on ones focus, if you recall I have always run my GAP DX Voyager antenna when looking for world wide activity such as in HFlink events, that antenna at 100 watts and an ATU works all Amateur bands 100%. However using a Skywave antenna heavily takes away from the ability of gateway stations to server users within NVIS range, I feel each such station should concentrate on their NVIS range user base. Which is why I feel the better approach for stations serving as gateways is to configure for automatic antenna selection where an optimal NVIS and Skywave antenna are selected as can be done with MARS-ALE. In Amateur Radio application this simply means that all such stations will serve their local NVIS range users better below 20m and all users at 20m and above. Such automatic selection of antenna is only available at present in MARS-ALE. I hope to see such automatic antenna selection show up in all Amateur software tools that provide for gateway connectivity which are not single channel oriented in their scope, e.g. WL2K PMBO's configured for scanning for example.
/s/ Steve, N2CKH At 01:10 PM 1/12/2008, you wrote: >I slightly disagree with my colleague Steve, while for MARS the majority >of ALE is NVIS, in the ham side our NVIS bands are so crowded and >cramped that the best comms occur higher. The goal is to have HFN >stations spreadout enough that one or more will be able to provide comms >whether NVIS or skip based. > >But Andy's post is still an excellent summary of ALE!
