HFU HF Underground
General Category => Amateur Radio => Topic started by: Matt285 on February 08, 2020, 1637 UTC
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So I worked a few AM stations during the AM rally contest and after thought to remember to look for activity. It is so hard to find these frequencies without SSB activity on them. Reminds me a lot of the issue people have on the 14.230 SSTV frequency. I've pretty much given up. I was quite excited to do something new, but it's very frustrating.
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Yeah, that 75M AM window from 3875kHz - 3885kHz kind of sucks, since you have those dudes on LSB 3878kHz and slop over from 3892kHz. Yeah, you can narrow your bandwidth, but then that takes out the whole reason that we want AM, fidelity. 14.286MHz AM is a wash, due to SSB, but Timtron's suggestion of 14.320MHz - 14.350MHz AM was way better for 20M. At least it was for me. Most of the time on 40M 7290kHz and 7295kHz is SSB free, but that just two FREQ's. Then, you still have international broadcasters jamming that up. On 80M, 3733kHz seemed fairly open to the AM group down there, but isn't that open to Advance and Extra Classes? What sucks even more is that in another month thunderstorms will clog things up with crashes down there. Yeah, in May Sporadic "E" will open up 10M AM on 29.000000MHz and 50.400MHz on 6M, but that leaves a dry spell called Spring time. I'm not hearing much AM anymore on 1885kHz 160M. What's up with that? Just a noisy winter? Looks like we've got to fight for AM. Huh.... Well, if we can ever find pockets of 2M AM, then we could take advantage of Tropo. I've got a decent rig for that band and mode, but nobody here wants to do that locally. Hell, I can't even get them to do 50.400MHz and 29.0000Mhz AM here. The big buzz where I am is C4FM Fusion DV. That's nice, and I'm glad to have an HT that now does that, but AM? No interest here. Kind of the same deal here with 222MHz. I seem to be the only one that wants to keep that band alive. Oh yeah... Here's another AM'ers site, http://www.amwindow.org/index.htm
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Is realize now when I wrote 'Something new' it may have come off as saying new like its FT8 etc. I meant to say new for me in the sense that I only ever used AM on 10m two decades ago. I'll keep checking the standard AM frequencies. Just checked back on 20m and its still overwhelmed with SSB. I know that these type of separations are not set solidly like the difference of CW/SSB. I wish they were, although I doubt it would be adhered to.
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1885 kHz is active pretty much every night. 1860 kHz has a ham radio bulletin "show" on certain evenings. 1945 kHz is active Tues nights with the Grey Hair Net and one other night with another net, too. AM has made a big come back with the ARRL supporting it with the AM Rally (last weekend) and all the Flex/Anan type and Class E radios out there now.
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Thanks for the info. I don't have much for antennas when it comes to 160 meters, but I'll keep an ear out.
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Surprisingly, my 80-10m off center fed dipole does very well on 160m - both RX and TX (with a tuner). It is up at 60+ feet and quite a bit above average terrain so that doesn't hurt either. :)
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I think a lot of guys use a separate rx antenna, often a loop, on 160. The typical inverted L in the back yard gets them on the air, but is crap for rx due local noise sources. Some guys just short the feed to an 80m dipole and operate it as a T antenna on 160.
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Recently on AM I have been listening to 7.295 at 1700 UTC. A group of AMer's check into the Noon Time Forum hosted by KC8ZUL. Normally it lasts for 15 minutes or so,I hear mostly east coast and a few mid-west operators.
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I enjoy listening to the AMers. You'll hear everything from military pinched audio all the way up to very wide HiFi audio. During the winter 160m gets much more active as 75m can go long and local contacts are tougher. 40m has a lot going on during the day all the way down to 7280 kHz sometimes. Saturday mornings at 8am ET is the Lonely Guys Net and they usually have a very good turn out (can sometimes run up to 2 hours) and a topic of the day that is normally very interesting. You'll get to hear AMers from all over the northeast during it.
http://www.lonelyguysnet.com/