Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio A recurring topic of conversation is propagation. There is learned discussion about sun-spots, A and K indices, forecasts, ionospheric probing, not to mention half-baked guess work from less scientific perspectives. It's been my experience that all these tools are wonderful, but none of them beat turning on your radio and having a listen, or better still putting out a call. So when do you listen and where do you listen? The trivial response would be everywhere, all the time, but none of us has enough time for that. In general, 20m, 14 MHz works most of the time. At night, frequencies lower than 20m, that is 40m, 7 MHz and 80m 3.5 MHz work better. During the day, higher frequencies, 15m, 21 MHz and 10m, 28 MHz work better. Of course this is not a hard and fast rule. As I said previously, there is no such thing as a perfect antenna, in fact we can prove that it cannot actually exist. Similarly, there is no such thing as perfect propagation. We tend to think of propagation in