443.000 propagation 1/26

After reading N0YNT's post about the 'new' 443.000+ (PL 118.8) repeater in St. Paul Mineapolis, I made an attempt to see how well it reaches out here to Plymouth. Matt's report of a "ker-chunk" from 394 and Louisiana was intriguing, though he didn't say how strong the signal was.

Since it was during daylight hours, I was limited to my unobtrusive exterior antenna in this attempt. It's a lot like a "rubber duck" with three ground-plane radials attached, but it fails to attract unwanted attention about as well as it fails to reach long distances. With a mere five watts, the 443.00 came back with a surprising S7.

Later in the evening, I was grocery shopping at Hwy 55 and Rockford Rd in Plymouth -- only four miles further west -- and I was completely unable to bring up the machine from my 5W mobile with tri-band antenna. When I got back home, I tried again with the initial arrangement, thinking that the machine had maybe gone down from the cold. Instead, it sprang back with the same S7 signal that it had before.

Now, the exterior home antenna is about 30 feet off the ground, even though it's lousy. That's a lot higher than my mobile antenna is, obviously. I'll have to check out the mobile coverage on my way into work tomorrow, but UHF is notoriously "line-of-sight". A higher, but poor, antenna will usually trump a lower, very good, antenna on the UHF band when it comes to distance.

I expect that mobile coverage will be good in Minneapolis proper, but it will be interesting to see approximately where the line is in the west.

As long as I'm writing tonight, I might as well add that I actually heard two guys on the VHF .030 today! People are finally using it. I've had no trouble reaching it on my commute, but it remains to be seen what the coverage area really is.