I was /7 at the Grand Canyon, called CQ 146.52 simp. (HT), station came back, 86mi away. W/ pics

My wife and I were on our honeymoon all last week (2yrs overdue). We hit the Grand Canyon West (Skywalk). There was no cell phone signal for many miles, so just for fun, I broke out my Yaesu VX-8R and called CQ four times.

Surprisingly, someone answered my call, from station KF7***. I relayed my position using the APRS on my HT and he said he would look it up, email me with further information and confirm me on QRZ.

Later that evening when I came back to the hotel, I got his email. He confirmed my position 86mi away from his base station on the NW side of Las Vegas, on 146.52 Simplex. DAMN! That was exciting and amazing that I could hit someone that far using an HT with only 5w!

This totally reaffirms my soapbox about ham radio. If something bad were to happen in the Grand Canyon, no one could call 911. Ham radio can certainly get the communications out.






And the obligatory pic of wifey

Is that the stock antenna?

Yes, it is the Yaesu factory rubber ducky antenna with the 6m tip screwed on.

I was able to hit a repeater on Mt. Hood, Oregon from my parents house in Banks, OR. with my Kenwood F6A HT. My signal was good and strong too. It's like 120 something miles as the crow flies. I was impressed. The conditions must have been just right. It is pretty much line of sight to the Mt. from the house.

If you have line of sight you don't need "conditions". I'm guessing the OP probably did have a little help from tropo.

Many amateurs never bother to use VHF simplex to find out what it can and can't do. Good for you, for giving it a shot and showing what is an admittedly an extraordinary example of what is possible.

Our radio club has a nightly 'check-in' on the repeater M-F, but on Sundays we do a 'simplex check-in' just keep everyone on the up and on simplex operation and to get signal reports from each other. It is a great exercise just to make sure your gear ( and the intended recipient's gear) is working properly. I just added an 'Echolink node' to really mix it up with old-times and add a layer of redundancy in interoperability.

I hope this wasn't too much of a hijack.

Very nice QSO.


At 10-12 miles offshore from the cruise ship I was still getting strong signal into the downtown repeater at 765ft high. I was at 80ft height with no obstacles in between.

On simplex into their beams at their QTH my Wouxun UV2D with stock antenna made it about 8 miles, though I could still hear them fine.


With VHF its all about line of sight, 1 mile or 1 million miles, doesn't matter.






eta: some interesting info:

The Voyager spacecraft use 23-watt radios. This is higher than the 3 watts a typical cell phone uses, but in the grand scheme of things it is still a low-power transmitter. Big radio stations on Earth transmit at tens of thousands of watts and they still fade out fairly quickly.

The key to receiving the signals is therefore not the power of the radio, but a combination of three other things:

•Very large antennas
•Directional antennas that point right at each other
•Radio frequencies without a lot of man-made interference on them

The antennas that the Voyager spacecraft use are big. You may have seen people who have large satellite dish antennas in their yards. These are typically 2 or 3 meters (6 to 10 feet) in diameter. The Voyager spacecraft has an antenna that is 3.7 meters (14 feet) in diameter, and it transmits to a 34 meter (100 feet or so) antenna on Earth. The Voyager antenna and the Earth antenna are pointed right at each other. When you compare your phone's stubby, little omni-directional antenna to a 34 meter directional antenna, you can see the main thing that makes a difference!

The Voyager satellites are also transmitting in the 8 GHz range, and there is not a lot of interference at this frequency. Therefore the antenna on Earth can use an extremely sensitive amplifier and still make sense of the faint signals it receives.

86 miles with a handheld is pretty slick.

So, you come all the way out here from Florida and don't stop down in the Phoenix area to say hello? IIRC there is a repeater at Grand Canyon Village.

50 miles should have been quite doable:

distance to horizon in miles = square root(height in feet * 2) [approximate]

sqrt(765 * 2) = 39.1
sqrt(80 * 2) = 12.6

39.1 miles + 12.6 miles = 51.7 miles

I know but my dinner reservation was coming up

I did a little modeling with Splat! The path loss to Las Vegas would have been in the ballpark of 162 dB. 5 watts is 37 dBm, 0.16 μV is -123 dBm, a delta of 160 dBm. Did the other guy have a beam antenna by any chance?

Get an Arrow handheld yagi.

If my wife let me had some more time, I would have hit the Phoenix area. It would have been extra points to contact a fellow ARFCOMMER.




From what he said over the air, he wished he was hooked up to a yagi... so I'm guessing it's not a beam antenna. He did say he was operating 25w, even though he was coming in slightly faint.

specs on shoulder mic? How does that thing work for you? Contemplating getting one for my VX-7R

Thanks

I'm curious what kind of S meter readings you were getting?

I love it. I was able to hold my HT high up in the air to receive his signal while having the mic close to talk. I have the GPS attached to the mic for APRS.

It's also great to have it hanging from a collar or lapel without having to unclip the HT from my belt everytime I wanted to talk.

In addition to that, I sometimes have my HT hooked into my car, so having the shoulder mic is really handy while driving.



I was half paying attention to the S meter, but at glances, readings were anywhere from 4-7, depending on how I was holding the HT.

I was going to guess about S5 (-117 dBm) given his power out (44 dBm) and the estimated path loss (162 dB).

Specs on model/source/cost/etc. Thanks

Whoops, reading is fundamental... lol... sorry.

Prices will vary depending on where you get them. I like Ham City because the prices are cheaper than most sites.

Sometimes I get accessories from Ebay from the Hong Kong dealers, especially electronic parts, it's cheaper and sometimes you'll find free shipping.

What I have is for the VX-8R
$60 - $80 MH-74A7 Shoulder Mic

You can have one of two ways of connecting the GPS to your HT:
$67 - $80 FGPS-2 you can connect this to the shoulder mic itself... or you can...
$29 - $40 CT-136 attach it directly to the HT if you don't want to use the shoulder mic

Here's a Yaesu Brochure, PDF on accessories for the HT

On our repeater on a 2100' headland a few miles north of Florence Oregon we were surprised one early evening to hear a ZL call. And more surprised to learn he was not a tourist in the local area but on his boat about halfway to Hawaii. Over the course of several days he would pop in from time to time as he worked his way toward the mainland, then as he worked his way up the coast from southern California to Puget Sound. It was not terribly unusual for us to hear from stations in the Seattle area (something close to 400 miles), and even boats off the coast well south of the Oregon/California border - but starting from that far out at sea, and so consistently for so many days, was quite unusual. It helped being (at the time) the only radio gear on the hill and able to utilize a high gain low noise preamp plus a top shelf duplexer and antenna, but yeah there were "conditions" at play.

Oh, nice pics in the OP, good to know what the Grand Canyon looks like. We were there late last summer - the fog never lifted and visibility on the South Rim was about 25 feet! Later at the Petrified Forest we saw about the same thing.

Where are you finding the GPS (FGPS-2) for $67?


20

I got lucky on a brand new GPS with free shipping on EBay from a Hong Kong dealer.

Sometimes you can find great deals or special sales during holidays, the big Dayton Ham Fest, etc.

She's way too good looking for you.

Just sayin'.

congratulations.


you are doing it (the honeymoon) wrong...


... but if you are going to do it wrong you should go big.

ar-jedi

one guy posts:

the next guy posts:



THIS ONLY HAPPENS ON THE ARFCOM HAM RADIO FORUM.



ar-jedi

She's smiling in the picture because "He finally put that damn radio away....why did he bring it on OUR honeymoon anyways?"

Overwater paths frequently have exceptional propagation on VHF/UHF/microwave bands, and the Pacific is well known for persistent overwater tropospheric enhancement. Usually high elevation at one end and low at the other. CA to HI has been done on most bands up into the microwave range IIRC.

Something that may seem completely impossible but actually has been done is working Hawaii from the interior/midwestern US on 2 meters. That extraordinary path is possible by a combination of a 2m E skip bounce, with the western endpoint at the Pacific coast which then puts the signal into the Pacific overwater tropo duct. I've worked a 2m E skip opening during a contest, which was just amazing - the most memorable event of my amateur operating experiences so far. Didn't have the luck of getting the extra hop to KH6, but just having the S meter pop up to 10 over 9 and higher, on 2m SSB, with a crowd of 6 and 7 callsigns, was mind boggling.

Funny, I've been hearing that a lot lately.




Actually, you're just about spot on with that statement; however, she was excited for me when I made that contact. She may not have understood all that was involved, but she was happy for me during my 5 mins.

She sounds like a keeper.....but really.....put the damned HT away!

When I came home from passing my Extra and told the XYL what I had done she said "extra what"? After I explained she was quite happy for me for about 12 seconds. Then she said "you forgot to take out the garbage and oh by the way when are you going to get a job"? I said "when are YOU going to get a job"?

It went sort of downhill from there. But our honeymoon was a long time ago and we have learned to move beyond those things pretty fast (I actually haven't had to clean my dinner off of the ceiling in quite a little while)

Amateur radio op buys a new ham radio, wife not pleased

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