Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio You've always been taught that VHF communications are line of sight and that the height of your antenna determines how far your 2m communication might go. So if I tell you that last week I spoke with a station that was 300 kilometres away on the 2m band you might be forgiven in thinking that I had managed to climb up most of the side of Mount Everest to around 7 kilometres so I could make my line-of-sight communications 300 kilometres away. I'll give you a hint. I was at my home, my house isn't on the side of Mount Everest and we were both using normal gear, nothing crazy, no amplifiers, no glitzy antennas, just the basics. So what's going on? There'ss a phenomenon called "Tropospheric Ducting" that comes and goes and if conditions are right, allows you to extend your line-of-sight communications to distances far beyond your imagination. So, what is this thing and how does it work? First of all, this is something related to the lowest part of the atmosphere, called the tropo