Re: [IRCA] [NRC-AM] Recent DXpedition to Grayland, WA & Florence, OR

[d1028gary@xxxxxxx]

Hi Bill,

Thanks very much for your detailed investigation of relative DU signal
strengths at the 800 ft. high ocean coast elevation near Florence and
at the much lower elevation near the Grayland Motel. I'm sure that your
detailed work will be very helpful in clarifying the principles
affecting ocean cliff propagation. Thanks also for posting the links to
many Australian and New Zealand signal recordings made at each
location, all of which are most interesting. Having recently gone
through the process of recording and posting many MP3 recordings from
the recent Cape Perpetua ocean cliff DXpedition, I can certainly
appreciate all the time and effort that was required.

In regard to the relative signal comparisons, the DKAZ antenna seems to
have done a great job at both locations, and I'm surprised that the San
Suci recordings at 800 feet do not show much of a signal advantage over
the Grayland recordings near sea level. I would have loved the
opportunity to set up at the Cape Perpetua ocean cliff site with the
PL-380 and 8" FSL antenna (the same combination used during the recent
trip to receive DU's at very strong levels) at exactly the same time,
and record some MP3's to add to the comparison. I have no doubt that
the PL-380 + 8" FSL combination would lose out miserably to the Perseus
SDR + DKAZ antenna combination at either of your locations if there was
a relative reception comparison, but because of the FSL antenna's
unique ability to set up at the very narrow ocean cliff site at Cape
Perpetua it apparently was able to tap into DU propagation of highly
unusual strength, even with the modest Ultralight radio receiver. With
the much more sensitive Perseus SDR the 8" FSL may well have produced
legendary DU signals at the ocean cliff site, instead of the booming
ones that were overloading the modest PL-380's front end.

Most of us have had the experience of listening to a distant AM radio
station on a sensitive car radio while we go up a steep hill. If the
distant AM station is located in a direction down slope from the hill
we usually can hear the weak station's signal strength rise
dramatically as we go up the hill in our cars. This dramatic effect
usually stops at the top of the hill, though, and as we go further away
 from the hill the weak AM signal begins to drop off again.  It will be
very interesting to run more tests on ocean cliff propagation to see if
this same effect applies to DU and TP signal boosts. Thanks again for
your detailed work, Bill, which is much appreciated.

73, Gary DeBock (in Puyallup, WA)


-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Whitacre <bw@xxxxxxx>
To: Mailing list for the International Radio Club of America
<irca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; am <am@xxxxxxxxxxx>; coastalroundtable
<coastalroundtable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tue, Aug 7, 2012 8:17 am
Subject: [NRC-AM] Recent DXpedition to Grayland, WA & Florence, OR


>From July 31 - August 2 I visited Grayland, WA and Florence,
OR.  At each location I set up a Perseus and a an 'extended
DKAZ' antenna pointing at 235 deg -- towards Hawaii and the
south Pacific [Aus/NZ].  The best day, of course, was the
last day and I have put sound samples from 1300 utc up
through 1280 kHz from both Grayland and Florence on a
webpage for comparison:

<http://realmonitor.com/am_logs_grayland6.php>

I'll be adding more as time permits.

The Grayland location was the famous Grayland Motel and
Cottages and the location near Florence was a place called
Sans Suci at about 800ft. elevation and back about 1000ft.
from the Pacific.  There are Google Map links to both sites
on the webpage above.

Also on the webpage are links to stats [stations logged,
countries logged, stations/country, etc.], a Google Map view
of the loggings and something I call AzBar which is a bar
graph of the number of loggings at given azimuth ranges -- a
good way to visualize how an antenna works.

There is also a link to a pdf drawing of the extended DKAZ
antenna, designed by Neil Kazaross.  It is the best
single-element, non-phased antenna I have ever used.  It's
pretty easy to errect and without phasing doesn't give me
the opportunity to screw things up!  What it does require
though is some tweaking of the termination resistance - Rt.

I know there's been a lot of interest recently in cliffside
DXing.  Perhaps some of the data in this report will let you
compare simultaneous loggings from two locations at very
different elevations. Unfortunately, the locations were also
about 6 hours drive from one another so I make no claims on
the issue based on these loggings but I won't be foresaking
the Grayland Motel anytime soon!
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