September VHF Contest
Dave Bernhardt
After action summary. The Contest was OK this year. Usually the weather is nice, this time it was unsettled, as happens once in awhile.
KE7MSU/R and seems there were some SOTA/POTA folks on too, which was nice to have on.
The one part I would like to mention happened Sunday morning on MSK144. 6M MS seemed weaker than other years, but still some on. Now, considering the weather was unsettled and tropo was fair, for a few minutes K7IU (CN97) was roaring in here continually for a couple minutes or so. What happened?
My suspicion is that we had signals bouncing off the planes heading to SeaTac. For years I have seen the track of planes heading north and appear to follow I-5 from Kelso-Longview as they start decent.
What is my basis? Years ago in the 2M AM days, one could hear enhanced flutter on signals across town as planes passed by on their way to PDX. Even today, is not Mt. Rainier used as a point to bounce off for the 1296 net? Is not an aircraft body a better RF reflecting surface? (think RADAR.) Come to think of it, doesn't MSK144 pulses remind one of RADAR?
When tropo is great, using this technique may not be worth the effort. However, when conditions are more marginal, this may be worth a shot. FlightAware does give plots of aircraft traffic, so this does not have to be a random event. From the PDX area, we can see the contrails of planes going over, then the contrails vanish when the engines are cut.
Anyway, here is an idea from an observation made last weekend.
de Dave N7DB, CN85uj
-- Dave Bernhardt Boring, OR
Mike Lewis
Get lots of airplane scatter here in the Seattle area. The doppler shows up on 432 and 1296 big time. Some of the reflection path has been stable and long enough to get FT8 contacts in the log.
When I was in Bradenton, FL (south Tampa Bay) there were 5 busy airports around me. The doppler smeared the screens all day long. So did a radar at times on 432 and 1296 bands.
I use a RTL-SDR dongle with sdroxide to watch aircraft ADS-B data. They just added ACARS decoding, have yet to try it. Watching the tracking map there is a north-south 32K ft flyway and an east-west 8K ft descending flyway is right over my head. Corresponds with the many flights I have been on here, can see my house below on landing patterns, and I-90 heading out.
Years back I had stacked 1296 homebrew big wheels with only 2W on my rover truck at a rest stop east of the Cascades along I-90. A major east-west corridor for aircraft. I worked WA7TZY over the mountains on CW via aircraft reflection.
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