Hey Merv, just the messenger here, experiences I actually had from a
long time ago. Keep in mind, our job was to handle paid traffic.
Hearing them and actually making money getting/sending traffic were
somewhat different endeavors.
The only "emergency" I got to work was a ship who had lost power in the
S. Pacific. No one sank ... no one even got wet. We had them QRK4-5,
NMO was QRK 1 on the Holy Frequency, so I got to work the "rescue," by
another company ship.
The original Gibson Girls were 600 meters, balloon or kite antenna,
copper braid and weight to toss into the salt water over the side of the
rubber raft. When we got ours on our missions [all on mountains], they
had added an 8 Mcs rockbound emergency frequency because 500 Kcs didn't
work real well over land paths then. It still doesn't. Receivers have
improved dramatically since the later 50's, we can hear things today
that were not audible then. I'm not surprised things are working better now
600 meters propagates a lot better over salt water than land, fairly
basic physics. That was the only point. And a possible apocryphal story:
When the WW2 surplus began flooding the market in the US in the early
50's, the Gibson Girls already had the 8MHz frequency, 8280 if my memory
serves me ... which it often doesn't. The story says it got changed to
8365 because people bought these things dirt cheap and did not know that
when they cranked them, they transmitted.
Just the historical messenger Merv.
73,
Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 50th Running of the Cal QSO Party 3-4 Oct 2015
- www.cqp.org
On 2/23/2015 4:11 PM, Merv Schweigert wrote:
Not quite true at all Fred, I copy east coast stations on a fairly
regular basis,
Eric is one that is a "regular", copy of various signals across the US is
daily operation. West coast and Canadian signals are copyable here
from before sunset until after sunset almost daily with audible
signals, they
are running a few watts ERP.
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