6m Meteor Scatter

[Elecraft mailing list]

John,
The best time for meteor scatter is at night or early morning.  At that time, your side of the Earth is facing the direction of the Earth revolving around the Sun, increasing the speed at which meteors and dust plow into the ionosphere, giving better "burns."  The worst time is around noon.  
For general info, Google "meteor scatter."  Read the WSJT-X manual.  It is pure gold.  MSK144 encodes and decodes very differently than FT8.
The best direction depends on where you live.  If you are in Texas hill country, your best directions may be your lowest horizons.  If you are in the flats, anywhere.  You will also get a big help from ground gain.  Experiment.
Here in the South SF Bay, my best direction is north, because it is flat that direction, and I can work CA, OR, WA, and BC.  
You will need to use RC5 MSK144.  While the FT8 crowd are still using mostly 1.9.1, ping jockeys upgrade immediately.  'Cause they're cool.  (Just kidding.  I have DXCC and WAS on FT8).
The best way to get started is to make schedules on the Ping Jockey site https://www.pingjockey.net/cgi-bin/pingtalk. Ask questions, people are happy to help.
Some ops never get on Ping Jockey, and you can make random contacts.  Those are the most fun.
Another great thing about MSK144 is that it will work with a NB.  Being in Silicon Valley, I ride my K3's NB controls like a bucking bronc.  But early in the morning noise is usually low,  except for my idiot neighbor's "pest repeller."
MS is good year-round.  I have been on during meteor showers when there was no increase in "rocks."  I have also been on during meteor showers when it was totally insane.
Be very patient.  I have worked guys in one minute.  I worked a guy last week that took an hour--40 minutes for the final exchange.  That was a massive burn lasting 10 seconds.  Go figure.  It is a lot like working QRP--some days you get skunked, some days you get 599+10 with your KX1.
Feel free to email me off-list.
73 Eric WD6DBM

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
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[Edward R Cole]

Many years ago I made some 600 mile contacts using 100w SSB on 6m
with a 3-element yagi.  Pretty sure it was during Perseids shower.

BTW best frequency for ms is 44-MHz (that's where professional ms
circuits are run) so 6m is the best band to try out ms.

On Saturday I finally raised my new 6m array of two 7-element LFA
yagis stacked 25-foot apart and 33 foot above ground (gain =
15.75dBi).  I run 1000w using a surplus Harris ch.2 TV amp (16
transistors in parallel).  Not QRV quite yet but soon.  I will be
doing 6m-eme and ms.  North end of Vancouver Island, BC is 1300 miles
from me with only one ms station. My station should work random
meteors any day of the year (if I can find anyone near enough that does ms).

details: http://www.kl7uw.com/6m.htm

73, Ed - KL7UW
   http://www.kl7uw.com
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[Jim Brown-10]

On 12/6/2018 12:59 AM, eric norris via Elecraft wrote:
> MSK144 encodes and decodes very differently than FT8.

Lots of great info in this post. I'll expand on this comment. FT8, JT65,
and JT9 are noise reduction modes -- the transmit the same message
several times in the message cycle, and they use the entire message
cycle to do that. They are designed to work on a path that is weak, but
exists for most of the message cycle.

MSK144, and it's predecessor FSK441, transmit the same message over and
over again in segments of a few hundred msec. All it takes is for ONE of
those few-hundred msec transmissions to get through. They are designed
for a path that may be there for only a few hundred msec or, if we're
lucky several chunks of a few hundred msec -- that is, when a meteor has
ionized a region of the atmosphere that reflects our signal to the other
guy, and, at some later time, the other guys's signal to us. As I
understand it, MSK144 does SOME noise reduction, but not much.

Another great thing about the implementation of MSK144 is that we can
choose TX cycles of 5-30 msec. Last I looked, most stations were using
15 sec.

The most surprising MSK144 QSO I've made was with a guy doing a 6M grid
expedition through nowhere NV, a path of roughly 400-500 miles,
mid-afternoon this past summer. The first stages (three, I think) were
done with him driving down the road transmitting 100W into a vertical.
He eventually parked and set up a small Yagi for the last two sequences
to finish the QSO. I worked him to fill in a total of four or five
nowhere grids, and failed on five others.

Last I looked, K1JT was suggesting that MSK144 be used where we had
previously used ISCAT, another mode designed for tropo scatter.

To understand these propagation modes, study the ARRL Handbook and 
Antenna Book. It makes very interesting reading, and using those modes
can be a lot of fun.

Anyone who says that these digital modes and propagation modes are easy
has never done it. I've been doing it for about five years, and there IS
a learning curve, and the more you know about the digital modes and the
propagation modes, the successful you are, and the more fun you have.

I've never tried 2M MS -- I'm in a very dense redwood forest (the trees
top out around 250 ft and my Yagi is at 125 ft) and those trees are
increasingly strong absorbers of RF with increasing frequency.

73, Jim K9YC

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