Charly K4VUD wrote:
>At the risk of a lot of jokes, I'm gonna ask the following anyway.
>Have any DXers (or just ordinary hams, if there are any) had the experience
>of feeling that any radio contact you made resulted from any form of ESP ?
Charly,
I've been a serious low-band SSB DXer for about 12 years, and I was a
very active amateur band SWL for 39 years before that. So I've had
over 50 years of practice digging out the weak ones. Don't know
whether to call it ESP, but I have noticed that I can sometimes
extract a report out of the noise when folks with comparable
locations/antennas can't. It's not always perfect, but the accuracy
is far better than random guessing.
I'm an electrical engineer by training, and spent a lot of my working
life in the oil exploration business. Using mathematical correlation
to extract signals completely buried in noise is a very important
technique there. I'm inclined to think that after many years in
DXing, our brains develop unusual expertise in correlation. I can't
necessarily pick the right answer from a report given just a single
time, but if it's repeated several times - even buried in noise - I
can sometimes "sense" what it is.
I'm not referring to "judicious guessing", which all serious DXers
have done under weak signal conditions. You know that if the guy at
the other end is experienced, he will most likely be giving you a 3
by 3, so you do the same. But I recall an example with a
non-guessable report which happened to me last December. I saw a spot
that Pres VQ9SS was on 3789 long path. Nobody around here - even
people with better antennas - could copy him. I couldn't either, but
I could detect his signal. VQ9 was new for me on 75, so I went for
it. I called, and by the synchronism between our respective
transmissions, it became obvious that he was coming back to me. But
what was the report? I asked him to repeat it several times, and
without ever consciously "hearing" it, I somehow "decided" that it
was 4 by 5 - which turned out to be correct when the QSL arrived.
So, I don't think your crazy, but neither do I think it's ESP. I
suspect it's a highly trained, involuntary correlation process.
73, John, NT5C.
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