Tales from Tropospheric Oceans...

[EAFrizzle]

Yeah, it's a ripoff of a Yes album title...

I put this here because there are plenty of stories, TX and RX, about the ghosts of RF, past and present.

Back in '96-'98 or so, I had the experience of being in several full-blown ducting events, and they can be absolutely amazing when they happen. Yes, when UHF, and then the 500-600 MHz TV channels (back in the analog days) start trespassing their boundaries, it's a full-blown ducting!


One story: Back then, I regularly drove into Houston for a Monday night Bible study with a few non-radio friends. I had a nice land yacht (Lincoln Town Car) that had plenty of room for people and radios. We do our usual pizza dinner afterwards and when we head for home, I turn on the dual-band rig in the car and start hearing all the simplex guys in Lake Charles, LA, at full quieting. This was about 9:30p, so quite a bit early for normal enhancement.

It was this night that I was introduced to a man in SELA who ran a kilowatt on 2 meters. Yep, a whole kilowatt on 2 meter FM. He had little choice but to run that kind of power; on normal days the cypress and pines literally sucked his RF out of the air. You think it's tough on CB with just a few hundred watts?

Anywho, the LA guys were all hollering at him to shut off the amp. We had a good time for a while, until it was time for me to start spinning the beams.

From my old QTH in Houston to the TV transmitters had the antenna posted SW. This also put Victoria, Corpus Christi, and Laredo in my beam path. Watched UHF out of Victoria and Corpus for a while, then got a channel in the lower 60s from Mexico (5 digit callsign beginning w/XE.

About 1 am, I was having more fun than one person should have, so I called a friend and woke him to share the good news! I told him to get his HT and put it on the Livingston, TX 440 repeater. He wakes up enough to do so, and we're having a UHF QSO on a machine ~80 miles away on our handheld. We accidentally woke up some guy wondering who was on the repeater; when we explained where we were, and what was going on, he just said, "Have fun, I've got to make some phone calls."😂

That was a good duct, but it was a period of time where the ducts kept getting better and better for a while. More on some of those later. 😎

 

[kc2asb]

Great story! I also did a bit of TV dx-ing. Picking up UHF and VHF stations from New England and Pennsylvania here in NJ was kind of cool.

On the radio side, I remember being up late on occasions during the summer talking 2m simplex or the local repeater. Tuning around, I would sometimes hear repeaters from as far south as Virginia, and north up into New England. Ducting is a very cool phenomenon.

 

[EAFrizzle]

Sitting here enjoying some spotty enhancement and figuring out how it typically sets up at the new QTH. Of the seven NWS frequencies, I typically hear five on an average day. The last two, .425 and .450, are my indicators for where I might hear something. Most often I hear Gilmer, TX (~100mi.) on .425, and Broken Bow, OK (~170mi.) on .450. I'm going to have to put some of the OK/AR/LA counties in my scanners for the good skip night's.

I've already set up lists with all the VHF stuff for NETX; the few months I've been here seem to indicate that's the main direction I hear from. Maybe I'll hear more western counties as the year goes by, but I'm not going to bother with them yet.

Back in Houston, good enhancement isn't as frequent as up here, but fairly predictable. An average night would bring in Beaumont, TX (~70mi.) in addition to the three NWS stations I could get regularly (one good, two spotty); a good night would most often bring in Palestine, TX (~150mi.) and random others.

Sometimes a really good duct would set up around the Gulf Coast that made for great Marine band and Railroad listening. Ship to shore telephony was big before the cellphone explosion, and some of those late-night calls could be  very interesting.

Of course, we liked to have a bit of fun with other hams at times. We'd throw out our calls on a few simplex frequencies that we knew had traffic some distance from us. Let them know we're mobile in Houston, the band must be opening up! We were definitely smack in the middle of downtown Houston, we just didn't mention that we were on top of a 25 story parking garage.

And parking garages bring up a whole 'nother set of stories, so I'll close this post now.

 

[EAFrizzle]

I've been lucky in my scanning QTHs, being near major metro areas, but still out far enough to hear the countryside well. Previous location was suburban, this one rural, but I have the option of two different scanning worlds when it comes to public safety.

If you want action, Houston and DFW (I'll have to ask in the Texas forum if it's "DFW" or "Metroplex") have it 24/7. If you want to hear crazy amounts of radio traffic, just listen to Harris County Precinct 4 Constables on TxWARN. If you don't set them to avoid, you may get stuck for an hour on one TG.

But I enjoy listening to the rural departments and agencies. Sometimes in Texas we get a thing that isn't a full-blown ducting event, but a nice signal boost across a good chunk of the state. That's when you hear the real-life stuff that you only thought you wanted to hear.

The wrecks. The medevac choppers. The fire brigades at homes and farms. The Troopers keeping people from seeing the above, while trying to investigate and aid the victims. The dispatchers coordinating it all.

We hear it.

So many things that never make it into the news cycle, we hear.

Some of the things we hear are quite sobering. "Caller is a 9 year old female that states her brother just shot her parents."
Yeah, that'll make you say WTF? out loud.

Things that happen in places that I consider "home", but will never appear on the news in the big cities. VHF with some atmospheric cooperation allows me to hear those things happening in places that I normally couldn't. That's what made me fall in love with VHF and chasing the vagaries that carry those signals into the distance...

 

[EAFrizzle]

Another story concerning the ductwork needs a bit of lead-in...

A buddy and I had been on CB and freeband, and wound up getting our ham tickets. We each had some ADI mobiles, effectively the first CCRs that had a very simple MARS mod. Had a few guys around east Harris county we talked with on 2m simplex. The main reason we got our tickets was that there was a surge of high school kids that got into CB and freeband at that time, and we could hardly find a quiet frequency that they couldn't access. They didn't have licenses, but they had scanners and were generally a bit of a PITA.

The easiest solution (to me) was to find a channel somewhere they wouldn't look. After perusing the assorted arcana in the Police Call tome, I set out to find a place to hide that wouldn't cause any problems. Back then, radio allocations were very specific as to what service could use a particular frequency. I found a set of VHF Tow Truck frequencies that had no one at all in TX or LA licensed for them. We picked the lowest 2 frequencies, and found we basically had a private channel, and none of the kids could figure out where we were hiding.

Everything was peachy-dory for a long time as we used this channel to coordinate running around town and general windbaggery. But late one night, a strange sound rudely interrupted our highly esoteric discussion. "GET THE HELL OFF OF MY RADIO!!!", in the shrillest voice this woman possessed came blasting from our speakers. Turns out, a duct opened up while we were babbling, and this Tow Truck owner in Florida wanted us off of her goat-stinking radio right this minute! And she was in no mood to hear how we were in Houston, TX, and not in her neighborhood. (And we were surprised they were not running any tones) We said adios and checked out our backup channel, then spent a few hours seeing how far we could talk on 440 machines.


And that is how I became a fan of DXing the NWS transmitters...