Mike Morrow, KK5F, wrote: "It is damnably difficult to radiate *much* power on 600 meters unless one has a lot of transmitter and real estate for antenna and ground." "Most hams will be lucky to achieve a few milliwatts ERP from a few hundred watts input power with small antennas not located over salt water."
Well I assume you are talking theory. I have been QRV for over a year on 600m running 100w RF output to an inverted-L antenna (43ft high x 122ft long) with large loading coil at the base. My calculated (EasyNEC2) ERP = 4.15w (not mw). Granted that this is an antenna efficiency of 0.8% so little RF is effectively radiated (most is warming worms). I consider my soil as poor and use four radials of 2-foot wide chicken wire laid on the ground surface. MY signal has been detected 2800 miles away! QRO and renting a WWV site is not needed! Some of our participants are radiating 20w ERP using 500w amplifiers. BTW my 600m radio is my K3 or alternate Rx: SDR-IQ. BTW I regularly check into the Elecraft 20m-SSB Net with 16w from my K3/10, with little problem. Again, QRO is overrated. Maybe in a QRM loaded 20m contest but this does not exist on 600m. Just a handful of experimenters and enthusiasts finding out what can be done with ERP<20w. Actually more than you would guess. Out to 300-km propagation is 100% all the time using ground wave. I made a series of GW tests in summer of 2010 running 4w ERP with +35 dB SNR ( S6-S7) at 100-miles at my two receiving partners. I wish our station in North Pole (AK) had been active (300-mi) to gather info at that range. In the winter 600m acts somewhat like 160m with lengthening DX over thousands of miles. I have copied a station in Buffalo, NY at about 4000 miles from me, and several instances of copying Vancouver, BC and Oregon (1300-2000 miles). The biggest limitation is static noise in the lower-48. It doesn't exist much up here in Alaska. So, yes, full-size antennas are huge, but a typical 160m antenna, if loaded, will work pretty good! BTW I've heard that theoretically bumblebees cannot fly! ;-) 73, Ed - KL7UW, WD2XSH/45 ====================================== BP40IQ 500 KHz - 10-GHz www.kl7uw.com EME: 50-1.1kw?, 144-1.4kw, 432-QRT, 1296-?, 3400-? DUBUS Magazine USA Rep dubus...@gmail.com Coming Soon - "Kits made by KL7UW" ====================================== ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
