Print

[N6YWU]

I would have loved to hear what cycle 19 was like, course even the population was less and very few smps.
I guess the closest I can get to that is if we had a large power outage during the height of the current cycle,
oh, thats right, the solar panels will still be on, can't win.

A few weeks back, just after sunset, a neighborhood PG&E transformer blew.  I killed the UPS and switched my radio to run off of battery.  Noise floor on 40M had dropped from S6+ to below S1.  Started getting double the usual number of FT8 decodes, and from much more distant grid squares.

[KU4UV]

Not sure about the 50's or 60's, a bit before my time.  I can tell you that the propagation during the late 80's and late 90's was really good.  I became a ham in 1992, but listened to a lot of DX on the scanner and shortwave radio around that time.  I clearly remember sitting out in my car one summer afternoon in 1998 and working Guam, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand on 10 meters using 25 Watts into a mag mount antenna on the back of my car.  I had a 10 meter dipole in the attic of my apartment in Lexington, Kentucky in the early 2000.  Back during 2000-20001, 10 meters was open to somewhere on almost any given day.  I used to work skip almost every day using a stock Cobra 146 GTL SSB CB radio in my car when I was a high school senior back in 1992 before I got my ham license. 

[KU4UV]

Not sure about the 50's or 60's, a bit before my time.  I can tell you that the propagation during the late 80's and late 90's was really good.  I became a ham in 1992, but listened to a lot of DX on the scanner and shortwave radio around that time.  I clearly remember sitting out in my car one summer afternoon in 1998 and working Guam, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand on 10 meters using 25 Watts into a mag mount antenna on the back of my car.  I had a 10 meter dipole in the attic of my apartment in Lexington, Kentucky in the early 2000.  Back during 2000-2001, 10 meters was open to somewhere on almost any given day.  I made most of my WAS contacts during that time using a HTX-100.  I used to work skip almost every day using a stock Cobra 146 GTL SSB CB radio in my car when I was a high school senior back in 1992 before I got my ham license.