Jim Hampton wrote:
John,

Sorry if I'm not impressed; 75 and 40 meters are good for hundreds of miles
on low power; thousands of miles at night. I ran 25 watts on 160 meters and
was good to cover the United States at night.

Power is not everything. The ability to change frequencies (I'm talking
decades, not channels) will determine what distances you can send and
receive well to. I remember well breaking into a group on 75 meters in the
Carolinas. I was running well under 1 watt. Way *way* under 1 watt.

In a contest a couple years ago, I discovered that I was working a lot
of stations on the west coast at qrp level. I had tuned my antenna at
low power, and forgotten to increase the power level. With my plain old
vanilla 96 foot dipole at 50 feet. If I could hear 'em, I could work
them. Funny - if you go to some of the antenna gurus, they'll let you
know what a horrible antenna that is - good only for warming clouds...

160 meters did me quite well even in the daytime. Check in to ground wave.
Not what you think of ground wave (which is space wave); true ground wave.
At that frequency, if you have it vertically polarized, the wave will react
to the curvature of the earth as a knife edge. I could pound into
Washington, D.C. in the afternoon. With all of 65 watts.

My handheld reaches into Canada 24/7. On 440 MHz. Of course, I have to
rely on a decent Canadian repeater for that, but the fact is that I hit a
Canadian repeater directly from the handheld with no Internet involved.

On hf, the proper choice (I'll leave 160 out of this as the antennas are
quite unwieldy) between 80 and 40 will allow you several hundred miles 24/7.
With a modest amount of power.

Amazing what can happen on 40 meters with a relatively simple antenna
and a few watts. During the NEQP, some of the Hams up there have accused
me of melting their coax! 8^)

So I remain unimpressed with power alone. I buzzed right through a kilowatt
station years ago running only 75 watts. It isn't the size of the ship;
it's the motion through the ocean )

Sometimes I think a little propagation education might be in order for
some folk. I still remember the fellow who was going to have a bulletin
on 10 meters, then 20 meters. For American coverage, those are two of
the *least* likely HF bands I would choose.

Not that I would choose to broadcast on our bands.....

- Mike KB3EIA -