Interesting coverage on Fleetnet

[EJB]

Been messing around with Fleetnet while mobile here in Burlington this past week. Here is my reports.

Scanner: 396XT using a Larsen 1/4 whip cut for VHF-Hi, mounted on my trunk.

1) : Burl/Oak + Lakeshore. 1AM Wed night

Charlton-excellent
Brantford-good
Fonthill and Skylon-excellant
Cayuga-good, scratchy
B-fad-decent, in and out
King City-Very good
Woodlawn (Guelph)-decent
Mowat and Brittania-Very good.

Aside from King City, no real surprises above. King City has exceptional coverage I feel anyways.

2) Cityview Park Dundas and Kerns Road, high up on the escarpment/mountain, same scanner, same antenna. 3-5 PM Thursday

All of the above as expected but B-fad and Woodlawn were scratchy. Surprising to me cause I really wasn't all that far from Guelph and B-fad.

What 'blew' me away was Whitby. I don't normally even monitor Whitby. No need to but when I re-programmed my scanner I put Whitby in, I have a meeting next week in Scarborough and don't want to lose coverage on my way there.

What really really blew me away was a strong signal on 142.590. I was mobile but I looked up the frequency on this site and was very surprised that the above frequency was the control channel for Pontypool. I was able to hear some activity on it, the Whitby/Toronto patch, and some MTOE but for the most part it was just a bit noisy for the scanner to do 'trunking.'

I haven't been any further north than Guelph for the last few years, we used to have a family cottage in Lions Head and I am very familiar with Durham in Grey County and its excellant coverage from as far south as Fergus up to Owen Sound, for a minute I thought that I was 'hearing this tower' but I would have seen London CACC and the Grey/Bruce Pen/South Bruce patch and I already figured that conditions were not favourable to the WNW of me.

I noticed that there was reports of Northern Lights being very bright all the way south, hard for me to tell if the lights I saw towards the 416 from Aldershot were city lights or what. I guess then that this event with the sun, the cold weather flow of air from the North and my height created the perfect conditions to 'score' a tower that I would normally ever monitor all the way here in the West End.


Always fun to scan things from a distance, sorta like Dxing,

Anyone else here besides Bob (ATC) that has monitored stuff to the east and north?

 

[ATCTech]

Hi Eric,

Those are all pretty much business as usual sites for me, the exception being Brantford because of the Escarpment looming over me to my southwest. Unitrunker has it captured right now, but it's not a particularly good signal.

During the unusual conditions of a few weeks ago I was receiving excellent all the way to the Woodstock tower (142.260) in that direction, very rare for me.

Just checked Whitby & Pontypool, both working very well here at the moment as are both Guelph sites and Primrose. Cedarwoods is there (weakly) too, but it keeps getting clobbered by the 142.590 voice channel at Niagara.

Bob