Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio Amateur radio lives and dies with the ionosphere. It's drilled into you when you get your license, it's talked about endlessly, the sun impacts on it, life is bad when the solar cycle is low and great when it's not. There's sun spots, solar K and A indices, flux, different ionosperic bands and tools online that help you predict what's possible and how likely it is depending on the time of day, the frequency, your location and the curent state of the sun. If that's not enough, the geomagnetic field splits a radio wave in the ionosphere into two separate components, ordinary and extraordinary waves. All that complexity aside, there's at least one thing we can all agree on. A radio wave can travel from your station, bounce off the ionosphere, come back to earth and do it again. This is known as a hop or a skip. If conditions are right, you can hop all the way around the globe. I wanted to know how big a hop might be. If you know that it's a certain distance, then you can figure ou