Frustrated over my new "hobby" of ham radio

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can you tell me, does VHF FM in general have signal propagation similar to AM, in terms of MUF and skip? or is FM only "line of sight" and only dx'able via trophospheric propagation via temperature inversion boundary layer?

I'm sorry it took me a long time to answer, I get really sidetracked by my job hunting. Well, I start a new job on the 29th of July so I'm going over old stuff. Well, as long as the frequencies are the same, there is not much difference between AM and FM as to how far the signals will go. I know myself, I've picked up skip from California from the California Highway Patrol (CHiPs) in the clear. I've also picked up South African police, the British Army on maneuvers somewhere, tanks from Fort Hood in Texas, countdown to an underground A-Bomb test in Nevada (this was in the 1980's), the Cubans on our local fire channel and so on, they were all in narrowband FM mode. The make much difference although if the bandwidth is more narrow, it is better for weak signal work so in a way, some modes are better like SSB And CW, but between AM and FM, not as much. I've also picked up Over The Horizon Radar from Iran on the ham radio 10 meter band, IIRC, they use AM mode but I had my SDR, Software Defined Radio, dongle in USB mode.

thank you that is fascinating can you do SSB on FM?

SSB and FM are different transmission modes. I assume you mean if hams can do SSB on the UHF and VHF bands, if so, then the answer is yes although there are agreements on what part of the VHF/UHF bands where SSB goes, AM goes, and so forth. Usually the lower parts of the the VHF/UHF bands are used from CW and SSB. Some of the amateur radio satellites use SSB as well.

thank you for your information would you say you living in ohio are at any kind of advantage in terms of radio transmission/reception? or would a person have an advantage if they lived on the coast?

If anyone has any amateur radio questions, feel free to ask. PM if you don't want to clutter up the forums. I'm an Amateur Extra and a Volunteer Examiner.

Advanced and Novice class licenses are no longer being issued. This has been the case since 2000.

There is lots of activity above 30MHz if you're in a major urban area. Amateur radio clubs frequently own VHF repeaters for members (and usually non-members) to use. There are repeater directories online. Most activity is on 2m (144-148 MHz).

The best way to get in on HF is check into a net. Once you've checked into a net enough, you become familiar to others who frequent that net and you can join their conversations elsewhere. If you don't like talking, digital modes are indeed an excellent way to enjoy your hobby without talking.

I'm generally lurking on 75-80m late at night. I may be just below 3.8 MHz talking to DX stations (sorry, 3.6-3.8 on SSB phone is grandfathered advanced and extras only, but you can listen anywhere). If I'm not on 80, I'm on 40. Since my antennas are resonant on 80m, I don't do as well on 40. Every once in a while I go up on 20m and once in a dog's age I get up to 10m. During solar max you can talk anywhere in the world (once talked to a guy in Sapporo, Japan like he was across town) without a lot of power and a huge antenna on 10m. 6m is similar, but propagation openings are even rarer during solar minimum.

If I were going to try for DX (distant contacts) on 6m, I would try between 50.1 and 50.3 MHz on upper sideband. Propagation on 6m (aka 'the magic band' is tricky. Generally, propagation is like FM (broadcast) radio, but there are several ways to talk to distant stations. One is tropospheric ducting (signal is refracted between layers in lower atmosphere), the other is sporadic-E (signal reflected off clouds of ionized particles in lower ionosphere). Another possibility (more suited to digital modes) is meteor scatter (signal reflected off of ionized meteor trail for a few seconds). If we ever get a decent solar maximum again, then you might see 6m reflected by the F layer of the ionosphere the way lower frequencies are. Or auroral propagation (signal refracted by aurora).

For the person trying to get HF to work: Did you check SWR? You may have to tune the antenna.

If you're looking for the simplified version, this WAS the simplified version...

Tropospheric ducting is more likely at or near the coast. That and line-of-sight travels further over water.

SSB is AM without the carrier and one of the. sidebands. FM is FM. Two different animals. BTW FM broadcast has a signal several times wider than FM communications. In the future, FM signals are going to be even more narrowband.

^^^thank you, AA, for your information i think if i was ever able to pass the basic license level, i'd concentrate on 6M. that is long been my fave band, a true happy medium of FM clarity and modest Dx-ability. does anybody here ever try for reception of distant broadcast signals? in a notorious tv and radio reception hole [spanaway, WA] during some rare conditions i was able to, using a handheld tv and am/fm radio, on the roof of the house in a 700' elevation area, pick up KVOS-TV-12 Bellingham WA [back in the analog days], CBUT-2 [vancouver canada], CHEK-6 [also Canada] and also channel 8 [KGW-TV] in portland. on FM, now and then i get vancouver BC [can't remember the call letters], one time a station up in burnaby BC, a station near ocean shores WA, a station in portland @ 91.5 MHz. only the FM stations low on the dial were receivable, below the MUF. on AM, i could easily get KSL [clear channel station] in salt lake city utah, KNBR-680 in San Francisco CA, a few stations in Los Angeles CA.

It all depends. I live in the Ohio River Valley so basically I'm in a bowl and I can only hit one 2 meter repeater in Wheeling from where I live. I can only get two TV, VHF, channels where I live too, the signals from Pittsburgh go way above my head. If I was on one side up of the valley or other, it would be different. I'd probably do better when I get to the flatter parts of Ohio. One interesting thing though, the valley is like a duct, when it gets rainy, sometimes an FM station from Toronto, Ontario would come in strong. At first, i thought of Toronto, OH, just north of me, but I don't recall and FM stations there and the station was giving the weather in degrees Centigrade and promotion Toronto, ON businesses.

One time when I was standing at the edge of Lake Erie in Erie, PA, I worked Canada on 2 meters using my HT with the standard rubber duck antenna running off of 6 penlite batteries and putting out only 1 watt.

I used to live west of Pittsburgh, I was on a hill so I got out more with my radio. I could hit East Liverpool in Ohio with a 5/8ths wave car antenna on a cookie sheet with 2.5 watts ans towards the other end, the Allegheny Mountains 50 miles east where the repeater was at the end of a chain of repeaters that went past Washington DC. On time, I had so many hams who wanted to talk to me from DC that it was so hard for me to dart out to the bathroom. We also had "Saturday Nights (Knights) of the Roundtable) on one local repeater.

Depending on the band and my elevation, I can hit repeaters from San Diego to Santa Barbara and all the way out to Catalina Island. Getting up into the San Joaquin Valley or the High Desert requires a 220 backbone. Or I can cheat and use an Internet link between two repeaters, or between my desktop and someone else's transceiver.

Or just drop down to 40 meters and hope my neighbors don't mind the TVI.

fascinating i had not heard of the amateur's roundtable before. so i learned something new. do you ever try to dx DTV signals? farthest i've ever been able to get is about 50 miles, with a treetop violet zone [deep fringe] "flyswatter" antenna with a signal amplifier. it takes really big guns to dx DTV.

DTV DX. With the flea power they run, 50 miles is DX.

I guess if you wanted to do that, you'd need a high-gain Yagi or log-periodic antenna (like the old roof-mounted antennas we all had before cable TV, only you don't need them to get as many channels any more) with a rotor, mounted as high as possible. You might also consider an antenna-mounted preamplifier. Make sure you have halfway-decent feedline as well. Coaxial cable rather than twinlead (TV twinlead makes a nice 2m/70cm amateur antenna if you cut it up just right ).

This is when I still lived jut west of Pittsburgh, PA before I lost the house because of my mother's passing. Analogue TV, well, I've picked up Washington DC and Muncie, IN although I've picked up audio carriers from far away, when the skip is really good, people have picked up the audio to the BBC and France's TF1 in the 40 to 50 Mc range. In fact, the first TV signal received across the Atlantic was in 1938 when RCA engineers on Long Island received BBC television via skip. Mt DTV records then, well, I've picked up Youngstown's channel 27, WKBN-TV and that is 50 miles away and Channel 10 from Altoona, PA just before they changed TV towers. Where I live in this valley, it is more like "forgetaboutit." There are times that even KDKA-AM radio is tough to get. Antenna I used ro both analogue and DTV was a set of Rembrandt brass rabbit ears from 1959 with 300 ohm twin leads which I still use today.

if you could receive DTV at all with rabbit ears, that is a sign that your Pittsburgh dtv reception was pretty good. the KCTS-9 [seattle] engineer told me flat out i should not expect to receive their dtv signal at all, even with a 4 bay flyswatter and in-line signal amplifier up in a tree. as it is, i get them about a third of the time, usually with drop-outs. so when somebody receives a tv video signal via skip, is it still intact [not rolling, recognizable and not noisy]?

Yeah, I only get two stations now because I'm in a valley so the Pittsburgh stations go above me where I cannot receive them. As long as I get MeTV, I'm fine. Now if I lived on the mountains/hills at one end or the other, I'm fairly confident that I would be able to pick up some of the Pittsburgh stations, maybe the PBS one out of Cambridge, OH. The Pittsburgh ABC affiliate, WTAE-TV was always tough to get west of the city, so they did put in a translator closer to the city for those who want to receive it better. Sometimes VHF/UHF signals behave due to weather like temperature inversions and so forth.