So far away from me ...

Daleandee

Daleandee

Final Approach
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Mar 4, 2020
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Dale Andee
Today while approcahing an airport in mid SC I heard a familiar voice on the radio at a known airport location in another state at a distance of about 300 miles. I was certain who this was (I know his voice very well) and he was calling positions at the airport he is based at. I tried to respond but some local traffic (we were on 122.800) was stepping on my reply.

Is this possible? I've made contacts on my radio of nearly 100 miles but this seems extreme. But, as a Ham guy, I do know that certain atmospheric conditions can occur. I did email my friend to ask if it was really him I heard at that particular time & place. Have not heard back yet.

How far have you communicated? Do we get QSL cards for aviation contacts? :dunno:
 
Called tropospheric ducting. Happens in the VHF and UHF bands and can be one direction only or multiple. We had a great roundtable going between repeaters in Fort Worth, Greenville Mississippi and Central Florida. We could all hit and open each other's repeaters with 40 watts or less. There ended up being about 20 people involved and it kept up for almost 2 hours.
 
Craig said:
Called tropospheric ducting. Happens in the VHF and UHF bands and can be one direction only or multiple. We had a great roundtable going between repeaters in Fort Worth, Greenville Mississippi and Central Florida. We could all hit and open each other's repeaters with 40 watts or less. There ended up being about 20 people involved and it kept up for almost 2 hours.
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This right here. I have a buddy who works VHF and UHF openings with a directional antenna and some of the distances he gets is pretty impressive. There is a whole subset of ham that tracks and works skip and ducting openings.

https://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html
 
Sac Arrow said:
Sure. AM band radio. Signals can bounce and travel far under certain circumstances.
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There use to be a AM radio station out of Tijuana that had a powerful transmitter and played rock (now called fossil rock) music. In the car depending..... sometimes I could pick them up as far north as Salinas - it was pretty good for the FM dead spot between Santa Maria and Monterey. One time flying back to Long Beach, via the Fremont > Fresno > Bakersfield route we turned them in on the ADF and listened to Casey Kasem for a bit...

ADF and Casey Kasem... oye! Am I that old?
 
I was on a car trip one time with a CB radio. I answered a call for a smokey report and they asked for the mile marker. Mine was 102, theirs was 156. The normally 2-4 mile signal had traversed 54 miles! More than 10 times the normal range. That is the only time it happened to me, but it can and does happen. As a Ham radio operator have you ever used Earth-Moon-Earth? You could theoretically talk to someone 1/2 around the world using that setup. It requires 2 to play and you might have to set up in advance with another ham operator first, like from a message board or chat room.
 
The current sunspot game makes this happen a lot more.

Many years ago, the power company in Washington DC had one way messages from the Havana Cuba dispatcher, and their trouble truck's responses. They did not receive our calls to them.
 
Try looking up sporadic e propagation. A number of articles show up. A friend of mine in Virginia on the 2 meter band got a QSL card from the Dominican Republic. So transmissions can be received at quite a distance.
 
As mentioned, yes it is possible and somewhat common. A few times a year I’ll be hearing an approach control that is about 350 miles away on one of the local frequencies. Same thing happens on 122.8 and other CTAFs.

If you haven’t been paying attention, we just had a big solar weather event that will affect radio transmission.
 
mondtster said:
As mentioned, yes it is possible and somewhat common. A few times a year I’ll be hearing an approach control that is about 350 miles away on one of the local frequencies. Same thing happens on 122.8 and other CTAFs.

If you haven’t been paying attention, we just had a big solar weather event that will affect radio transmission.
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I've heard mention of the solar events but wasn't really focused on that. Many years ago I was more active with my amateur radios and made a number of contacts around the world using beam antennas and even dipoles (when I lived in a restricted neighborhood with covenants - never again). I've had some long distance conversations with my aviaton radio but this kinda surprised me.

And yes, I remember, Kasem, Wolfman, The Midnight Special, and Don Kirshner, among a few others. I'm getting kinda old meself ...
 
A California Highway Patrol officer told me that one cold, clear winter night he was at the summit that formed our county line (about 2000 MSL) when a southern drawl came across the radio, using a unit number that CHP doesn’t use. He asked who it was, and it was a highway patrolman in something like North Carolina. The CHP officer followed up on that, and sure enough, the frequency and callsign checked out. They were both low-band VHF, around 40 mHz.

When I was a kid in north central PA, at night I could listen to an AM station from Chicago, and another from Ontario (CA) (Canada, not California).
 
My personal best with marine VHF was over 400 miles one morning when we heard some friends. We were in Aves de Sotavento and they were in St. Croix. We were surprised to hear them on the VHF channel 16. Changed to another channel and verified where they were and talked for around 20 minutes. Started losing them and changed to the SSB to finish the conversation. Both boats had 25W radios with antennas at 50-60 foot. We normally only got 10-15 miles with the VHF.

Best with the SSB was around 6,000 miles Tobago Cays to 150 miles east of Tahiti. 150 watts.
 
It’s not uncommon for folks in California to have VHF contracts with folks in Hawaii thanks to trans atmospheric ducting. You need to be at the right height msl, conditions, etc.

73
 
Ventucky Red said:
There use to be a AM radio station out of Tijuana that had a powerful transmitter and played rock (now called fossil rock) music. In the car depending..... sometimes I could pick them up as far north as Salinas - it was pretty good for the FM dead spot between Santa Maria and Monterey. One time flying back to Long Beach, via the Fremont > Fresno > Bakersfield route we turned them in on the ADF and listened to Casey Kasem for a bit...

ADF and Casey Kasem... oye! Am I that old?
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Used to listen to same in Phoenix, late at night.
 
Friend of mine that was a long time 747 captain, said they used to dial WBAP up in the ADF once they climbed past 15K feet on their way back from Honolulu.
 
Tropospheric ducting in the 2m band isn't uncommon. I've known our central Florida repeaters to connect up with New Orleans and other Gulf locations.
 
Craig said:
Friend of mine that was a long time 747 captain, said they used to dial WBAP up in the ADF once they climbed past 15K feet on their way back from Honolulu.
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My dad was doing that out of Seattle and would request direct KDFW, 727 Continental airlines, in the 80's. They did not have long range nav back then. One night ATC asked how they were doing it. After confessing they were put back on Jet Airways.
 
Did anyone ever listen to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM from the highlly acclaimed WWVA in Wheeling WV? Was some weird stuff being disscussed on there ...
 
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Daleandee said:
Did anyone ever listen to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM from the highlly acclaimed WWVA in Wheeling WV? Was some wierd stuff being disscussed on there ...
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Back during my college days, I worked summers at Disney World as an audio tech. We did night shows in the summer, and I was often driving home in the wee hours. Art Bell kept me awake for the drive. "Weird" may be an understatement....
 
Ham radio guys talk literally across the world on the lower bands taking advantage of skip conditions.
 
cowman said:
Ham radio guys talk literally across the world on the lower bands taking advantage of skip conditions.
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Yep. From my home in central Florida, using 100 watts and some wire in the trees, I've spoken with people in Japan, central Russia, the Falklands, Kiritimati, etc. And even less power using digital modes. It's pretty amazing to communicate with someone halfway around the world using less power than a dim lightbulb.
 
Craig said:
said they used to dial WBAP up in the ADF once they climbed past 15K feet on their way back from Honolulu.
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Bill Mack and the Up All Night Truckers Show.

Had it on the dial many times.
 
I'll chime in on yep, it's ducting and it's cool. It's dependent on frequency, not type of modulation. VHF hi band is just about the same as 2M ham band and aircraft band, all maybe 120-150 MHz more or less. Normally it's line of sight, short range, but once in a while we'll get repeaters from mid-PA into up here, maybe 200-300 miles away. And 100 or so is even more common.

I think more rare in the UHF frequencies, 400+ MHz, but not positive. Intermittent really long range communications happens all the time on VHF low, to the point that it would regularly interfere with regular fire communications, but never reliable enough at long range to be good for much of anything. More or less, HF or 30MHz and lower the bounces are more predicable so those have been the go to for long range communications since radio people have known how it works. It's all low bandwidth, but it works without satellite. There a lot of science around the different layers, and used to be sites around the world that would provide data on the state of the different layers.

Yep, Australia is still providing radio weather:

 
There was a while where I could routinely pick up a commercial FM station from Toronto in and around my home in Roswell, Georgia. 15 miles to the east where my office was, I couldn't get it. I mentioned this to a coworker who lives near me, he had the same exact experience, near our homes we could hear this station, but near the office we could not.
 
Daleandee said:
Did anyone ever listen to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM from the highlly acclaimed WWVA in Wheeling WV? Was some weird stuff being disscussed on there ...
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It is still on... George Noory host is now... a lot of:

Free-Hat-In-Every-Box....jpg
 
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