I've spent most of my ham career on or near 80 meters. The question depends on what part of the sunspot cycle you're in.
If sunspots are at max, 40 meters is generally solid during the daytime hours for those distances. At nighttime, 40 meters gets "long" and you will need to shift to 80/75 meters for regional communications. When sunspots are at minimum (like now), 40 meters will too long for regional comms except at mid-day. 80 meters is pretty noisy during the day -- 60 meters works nicely but is USB only. After dark, 80 meters gets too long for regional comms, but 160 works nicely. For NVIS, a low dipole or inverted vee works fine - no need for a fancy antenna. You just want something that radiates UP. (Verticals radiate towards the horizon - nice for DX, but terrible for NVIS). There's a Yahoo group on NVIS that you might be interested in... also, there are websites where you can track the "critical frequency" - the highest frequency where a signal going straight up to the ionosphere will be reflected back. For NVIS, you generally want to be as close to the critical frequency as you can without being above it. Check out http://solar.spacew.com/www/fof2.html Andrew O'Brien wrote: > I am familiar with NVIS antennae but do not have a particular NVIS > installation, I do not have real estate for 160M either. So what > bands and "regular" antennas do you use for this ?
