Hi All,
In the event that you do not subscribe to Paul Cook's [K7RA] weekly propagation newsletter, you really might give it a go. It is most informative and it is especially educational to a new ham like me.
Anyway, I wrote to Paul mentioning my summer and early fall experiences with the S.B.A.R.C. repeaters and he included it in this weeks bulletin.
In case you haven't read it, here it is for your reading.
73,
Alan
Alan Vigeant, KI6HPO of San Marcos, California wrote, "I'd like to inform you of past and most recent conditions here in NE San Diego County. Since early April, I've been having daily chats with my good friends at the Santa Barbara Amateur Radio Club, which is situated about 165 miles NW of my QTH."
Alan continues, "I am at 2,200 feet of altitude, on the SW rim of what I like to call the Palomar Ridge, which is about 5,600 feet above sea level. Between the two rims is what I call the 'Palomar Trench.' My QTH is about 12 miles SW of the Palomar Observatory. Using William Hepburn's 'Worldwide Tropospheric Ducting Forecasts web site (see http://www.dxinfocentre.com/tropo.html), which has proven most helpful to me, I can pretty much set my watch as to when the duct will be forming. My QTH is about 40 miles east of Oceanside, California. My signal follows the ducting which occurs in the trench and then goes up the coast of Southern California to Santa Cruz Island, where their 220 MHz repeater is."
He goes on to say. "The past week proved to be a most curious one for me. While I was speaking to the 7:00 AM SBARC Morning Net, I noticed that the S-meter on my 220 rig (I utilize the club's 223.920 repeater) began to fluctuate rapidly."
He ends with, "Looking out my garage side door, I could watch the cloud cover come in from the Pacific; as I looked on, I could actually see that as the cloud cover rose, the meter would decline to an S-3. As the Sun grew higher in the sky and the cloud bank began to recede into the Pacific, the meter would register an S-9 to almost 40 over. At times, during the summer evenings, I could look out along the Palomar trench and look to the horizon to see if prop was going to be good or not so good for the evening."
Thanks, Alan! Very interesting report.