Here in Northern California, at least at my QTH, the bands seem to be in very poor shape. (It doesn't help that my OCF dipole has one leg on the ground due to high winds.)
At times like this, the SCAN function available on most Elecraft transceivers can help you find signals you might otherwise miss. SCAN does the work for you while you check your email, play chess, re-read The Lord of the Rings, shave, etc. When a signal pops up, scanning stops, and the receiver unmutes briefly so you can consider the signal's worthiness. As you'll discover, bands that were "dead" may not be, in reality. My favorite band for this sort of thing is 15 meters, in the late afternoon. A minute or two after starting a scan, you may hear DX appear from out of nowhere. For specific instructions for your rig, check the table of contents in the owner's manual. Here a few general tips: - use a narrow filter passband when possible, especially if the band is noisy - the tuning RATE in effect when scan starts determines how long it takes to scan the selected segment; finer-tuning slows things down, and may result in detection of weaker signals - if the band is noisy (QRN), the SCAN function may unmute too frequently; try using the noise blanker 73, Wayne N6KR ______________________________________________________________ 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 Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
