way OT CB skip

Up here in the twin tiers of new york state us guys like to play with the CB radios. We get a lot of skip at times. This skip always sounds like mexicans. cant seem to raise them. Anybody else do this for a hobby or get the same skip or know abouts where it comes from?

Dad fooled with CB's when I was a kid. SE Ohio, Sunday mornings waves would be going about right and he would talk with a guy in Nova Scotia. Had a 100 watt amplifier in the pickup and couldn't go anywhere without finding a hilltop and trying to raise someone far away.

Dave

Not so much but I do radio and have been for years I guess I ve had a radio since about the middle 70 s I m in the N/E Tenn

Haven't played with CB's since high school.(late 70's) We still have them in our tractors though, cheap way to talk to family members operating equipment if close by. Back then had the time to try to talk skip. I was able to talk to someone in Arkanas and Oklahoma.(I lived in Iowa then and now.)I dreamed of getting a sideband CB so I had more power. To be young again. I didn't have a amplifier but most people did that could talk skip. There is a chance that you can talk skip but the weather has to be just right. Oh, and by the way it was illegal back then to talk to skip I don't know if it still is.

Nobody has an explaination why the CB band was jammed in there beside the 10M Ham Band. Skip is the norm.
The CB band should have been in where the Family Mobile and Buiness mobile radio bands are currently. In the 400MHz band.
Shorter antennas and no skip too.

Many years ago after moving from indiana to colorado (7000') turned tv on. Got local station from terre haute in. Was local newscast which I thought had pushed vcr play and inadvertly captured news from home on tape we had brought with us. No it was live. Only happened once. Just did not know tv could skip or travel that far.

back in the eighties i was heading up the road and was on theCB I was near a broadcast radio station tower and cought a skip and chatted with a guy in hawii im in centeral wis. I wonder if the skip had anything to do with the big tower nearby?

The skip travels east to west as the sun sets so someone in NY will get skip when they don't on the west coast. That sets up different levels of the atmosphere to let some signals through at certain frequencies and then different levels to reflect a signal. The higher in the atmoshpere a signal can go before being reflected, then the farther it will reflect. The sun keeps the signal down but it opens up at night. Different frequency wave lengths affect how far they skip as well.

There are certain times and frequencies where you can talk to Europe and then later to talk towards Asia.

Lots of cans down in mexico and south america on the ham bands and cb as well. They all seem to use high powered amps which many can't or don't have in the US. Also takes a directional antenna to transmit north and south. You will receive ok with your whip dipole antenna but you can't put enough power in the right direction to carry on a conversation.

Also when there is a transmission on one frequency, it also does it on the resonate frequencies but not as powerful. Some of the skip may be from resonate frequencies from the ham bands. Then you have the fellas down south who don't worry about oversight from the authorities who don't have their equipment tuned right for the frequencies or who just move past the limits to use those other bands such as the cb band.

Go to ARRL website and then become a ham. I don't have time to gab on the radidio but it is fun to get together for events like field day and try to make contacts. I do it more for the NWS as a storm spotter. It's also more of a night time hobby.

TV channels 2-6 are low band 54-88MHz. They carry well anytime and will skip or even duct on occassion.

If you are curious, there is a thing called the MUF. Short for Maximum Usable Frequency. Different atmospheric conditions cause it to go higher/lower or stay normal. There are situations where you can have a pipe line to some place, usually a one hop skip. Sometimes it will double hop or more and sometimes you can talk to Australia by pointing a beam antenna the opposite direction from them. It is called long path. I have done it once or twice. Longest communication I have had is McMurdo Station, Antartica on 100 watts, if I remember correctly. I talked to the diesel mechanic there who said it was 84 degrees below zero with a wind chill that made it a hundred and some. He told me that they serviced their equipment, changed oil, filter and fuel filters and anything else that looked like it needed it. He tightened up the dozer tracks and run it back out. And the way I understand it, sit there running till another 30 days when they done the same thing over again. He said his helper came in and told him he better look at the dozer tracks, too tight, might break something. He had just got down there and wasn't used to the temperature expansion/contraction thing at those temps. He said he was ready to come home and had just gotten down there. Must be the money???? This can make us feel a little better about our low/rough temperatures. ohfred (KE8SS)

Always hated running past Boston on the Semi..

Always was a bunch there with High Power, swamping many channels each way from their transmitting channel...nearly needed to just turn it off until I was far away from Boston..

Ron..

Buickanddeere.......the reason the original CB was in the 11M band next to the 10M ham band was vacuum tubes and supposedly limited to 5-watts QRP. Unlike today, transistors did NOT work very well at high frequencys. Yes, 400mhz is more better for short-range communications and NO skip. .......Dell, ret FCC licensed Engr, 1958 ex-K0OAZ, KJ6DA, W3EPS

back in the days the US Army had me working on 50kw AM radio sets, twin sideband units with mechanical frequency tracking

talked and sent teletype all around the world using ionosphere, sunspots really screwed things up, had to change freq as the day went on to get proper number of skips

didn't know it worked with FM too