Any mention of 160 Meters (often referred to as \u201cTop Band\u201d) usually conjures up images of extensive antennas strung up over large amounts of real estate.\u00a0 I always thought of 160 as a noisy, seldom-used ancient band left over from the early days of amateur radio, and never considered actually using it.\u00a0 I live in a condo, and antennas need to be stealthy and small; hardly compatible with Top Band activities!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have a 14 foot vertical (made of nested aluminum tube) on the roof of our 5-story building, and have an Icom AH-730 automatic tuner at its base.\u00a0 The ground consists of the building\u2019s sprinkler system standpipe, plus three 17 foot radials that are glued to the roof\u2019s membrane.\u00a0 Cables run inside an air duct down to my shack in the suite below.\u00a0 I use an IC-7300 transceiver, which easily interfaces with the tuner, and I am able to get a decent VSWR on all bands from 6 to 160.\u00a0 The antenna works great for the higher bands, but I don\u2019t get out that well on 80 meters because the radiation resistance of the electrically short vertical is quite small, and ground system losses dramatically reduce the efficiency.\u00a0 On 160, the overall antenna efficiency is probably not much more than 1 %, so my ERP is around 1 Watt \u2013 hardly what you need to operate in a contest!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brian (VE7JKZ) is always encouraging me to enter into CW contests, and suggested that I enter the CQ 160 CW contest this weekend (Jan 24 and 25). I wasn\u2019t expecting great things, but decided to give it a try. The contest started at 2 pm on Friday, but the band was absolutely devoid of signals at that time. Noise level (both natural and man-made) was high, but I managed to reduce it to a \u201cdull roar\u201d (S4-5) by using the 7300\u2019s NR feature and narrowing the bandwidth to 150 Hz. Around 4:30 pm (just before the sun set) I started to hear signals. As darkness settled in, there were lots of signals from 1.80 to 1.85 MHz, and some of them were quite strong. I quickly worked the strongest ones, but then discovered that a lot of stations just couldn\u2019t hear me! Even fairly strong stations would often not respond to my calls. I suspect that everyone has a local noise problem, and the criteria for being able to work a distant station is as much about their local noise level as it is the distance involved. I gamely kept working at it, and eventually made 25 contacts across most of continental US, and one each in Mexico and Hawaii. When it seemed like I had worked all the stations who could hear me, I shut down for the rest of the evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Saturday was nice and sunny, so I thought that I would try to improve the antenna situation. I managed to attach a 5 foot whip to the top of my vertical, which should have almost doubled the radiation resistance on 160. I thought that the improved antenna efficiency might increase my signal strength at a distant receiver by perhaps half an S-unit. Every bit helps! I got back on the air at around 5:30 pm on Saturday, and didn\u2019t notice much of a difference. However, I did manage to log 13 more contacts before I packed it in for the day. Brian sent me an email to say that he had managed to log a JA station on 160, and I was impressed!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sunday morning I woke up at 7:45 am and headed to the bathroom. The sun was just starting to appear to the East, so I assumed that 160 would be dead. I turned on the radio just to be sure, and things were pretty quiet except for a couple of West Coast stations that I had already worked. I noticed another good signal down at the bottom end of the band, and copied his call sign as JH4UYB. WOW! I gave him several calls, and eventually got him to respond with a question mark. The Japanese operator was very patient, and it took lots<\/u><\/strong> of repeats, but I eventually got him in the log! Apparently there were several Japanese stations being copied in BC for a one hour period around sunrise on Sunday morning, and I just happened to have the radio on then. The band soon completely faded away, and I shut down operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After just over 2.5 hours of operating on 160 this weekend, my\u00a0final tally was only 40 QSO\u2019s, but the experience gave me a new appreciation of what Top Band can offer.\u00a0 What a band!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I will have to come up with a better antenna for the next 160 contest! (Balloon? Kite?, Crane<\/em>?)\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cheers, and 73<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roger,\u00a0 VE7AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Any mention of 160 Meters (often referred to as \u201cTop Band\u201d) usually conjures up images of extensive antennas strung up over large amounts of real estate.\u00a0 I always thought of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contesting","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5902,"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900\/revisions\/5902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/islandhf.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}