A Note to Leo JJ8KGZ

Good morning Leo. I will listen for you on Saturday around 2200 Zulu. I hope you have good luck with your phased antenna experiments. While planning your experiments you may want to refer to a program called VOACAP. It is a very well known propagation prediction program that runs a set of charts for a month at a time. I ran the program for the short path between JA and Texas on 14 Mhz using dipoles at 35 feet. The best hour is marked by a box and in the case for April, the best hour will be at 2400 Zulu. Of course the path to our West Coast is better and different but I didn’t run that plot. In this case our (TX-JA) the best hour is the hour with the best SNR. I know you have work commitments to consider but you may have some better opportunity just an hour or two later in your day or perhaps note for a future attempt. The RED line is the forecast MUF line for zero SSN. Plot follows:

My code practice friend and I use this forecasting tool to help plan our code practice sessions each day and it works very well.The graphical interface that I posted above is a shell that takes VOACAP outputs and puts it into a friendly graphical interface called Ham CAP. Both VOACAP and Ham CAP are free downloads on the internet. VOACAP requires a little reading but should you be interested I can point you to some good tutorials. I hope this helps a little bit.

Best of luck with your experiments Leo. Thanks for reading my Blog. Best, Chas W7MAP/5