Frnak McKenney wrote:


Hm. Wonder if anyone has built an antenna whose polarization shifts
to "best match" the incoming signal? (No, not _this_ weekend!
grin!)


Yes, such things have been built. There are some French researchers who
built an adaptive combiner that combined multiple polarizations, and
also did the processing to allow using both the ordinary and
extraordinary ray, and substantially improved link reliability on 1000km
skywave paths.



A minor update: It seems that I was _mis_tuning my antenna,
adjusting it for the strongest signal (highest stack of LEDs lit).
Over the past two days either I've finally tuned it _correctly_ or
I've done that _and_ the signal has improved. Whatever the
cause(s), I can now -- at times, in fact for an hour at a time --
hear the tocks fairly clearly and even understand the voice. (Who
knew the announcer's phrase for UTC "Coordinated Universal Time"?).

UTC is not an acronym. It's a madeup identifier that matches neither
the English (Coordinated Universal Time) or the French (T U C.. I won't
even attempt to figure out what it is..).

These sorts of international metrology things have all sorts of such
negotiated compromises in them, stemming all the way back to the Prime
Meridian being in Greenwich, but measuring in meters.