Is there a way to tell the Min, Max, and average reception for your unit?

[stlouisx50]

How do you tell if you are picking up your Minimum , Maximum or Average reception with your unit.

I would think there would be a few factors that play a part here;

- Weather
- Cars, trucks, trains etc.
- Trees swaying
- Towers swaying
- Other frequencies between you and the transmitter
- Atmospheric Conditions


But is there a way to really know what the average is? I generally use the weather frequencies to calibrate my antennas possession until I get the best reception or until I get as many audible frequencies as possible.

I can pick up some distant frequencies one day, and within a few hours I can't hear them. This is not skip that I am referring to as the stations are extra ordinarily distant.

 

[w2xq]

No. Temperature inversions such as at sunrise and ducting along weather fronts will change conditions on a daily basis. HTH.

 

[stlouisx50]

Thanks, for the piece of mind knowing that signals always change .

=)

 

[BushDoctor]

For range a good place to start is add the height of the transmit antenna plus the height of the receive antenna and find the square root of that sum and multiply it by 1.23

example 100 foot tower + 3 foot mobile antenmna = 103 feet take square root is 10.14 miles X 1.23 is 12.47 this works for lowband. for high band take 2/3rd for 450 take 1/3 800 1/5th

In my 40 years of working on 2 way radio equipment as stated above lots of other factors come into play. As an example on the PA Tpk during the winter months the mountain top repeaters couls lose the final output but with no foilage the little amount of power that could leak out from the drivers we adequite for normal communications. However when the spring foilage appeared the foilage soaked up the power and the system failed to work properly and everyone was writting up trouble reports. as long as the weather permitted we were doing PMs but they never switched to standby repeaters till the spring even though a repeater may have only had 30 or 40 driver watts which only several may have reached the antenna cause of no direct connection between the driver and antenna instead of 300


i do have a chart i can email u that takes into account power and height and freq wb4igu@aol.com