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Strong Tropo in West TX this morning

Out here in Lubbock...the weather has been unusually warm with record highs in the mid 80s....kicking off the tropo season a little bit earlier here.

Heard a couple Dallas stations this morning.

Heard one station out of San Antonio today.

But the one catch that really blew me away was catching KOBW 104.1 "The Brew" out of New Orleans via tropo! It's a western rimshot of New Orleans but I was still very impressed that it travelled all the way across Louisiana and Texas. Farthest catch with tropo yet!

And unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me so I couldn't catch it on film...but highly unusual for february around here.
 
Lubbock to NOLA is a pretty good haul. But, I'm not surprised you were hearing that stuff.

I'm a ham and was able to get on 2m (144 MHz) that morning. From here in Memphis, I worked XE2OR in Northern Mexico at 792 miles. Interestingly, he is not that uncommon, but it's always fun to work him.

If you're curious, here's what it looked like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep1nlt_NsdY

DE
 
Nothing to report from Tampa, unfortunately. The FM band sounds normal.

I guess we're a little past the fringe of that big opening across the Gulf and it doesn't quite cover us. :(
 
gar fla said:
Last spring, I got my best FM tropo catch ever.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkRK9nP1Li8

Is that hooked up to an outdoor antenna, or are you just using an indoor dipole. Either way its impressive, but a lot more impressive on an indoor antenna. I live in Upstate NY, and most of the year tropo is dead. About the only thing we have going here is the lake inversion over Lake Ontario which brings Toronto and Buffalo stations (around 200 miles from me). I still have yet to break the 300 mile mark on tropo but I only have an indoor antenna.
 
I was just using the little extendable antenna on the radio.

There have been times in the past where I've heard stations from Houston via tropo with better reception than that.

The Gulf can produce some of the best tropo conditions anywhere in the early spring.

Back when there was analog TV, it would be very common to have co channel interference with those lines and bars several days in a row and even continuously from night throughout the day.

Often too, you'd see words running across the bottom of the screen that said. "Atmospheric conditions are causing problems with reception."

If you just had rabbit ears, some of the signals could be so strong they could sometimes over take the local stations if the antenna were in the right position.
 
Yes, I miss the heady days of Gulf Tropo when I lived down there. Amazing stuff...

From the Mississippi Coast, I could often watch TV stations in South Florida for days at a time -- often snow-free. That was fun.

Occasionally, Mexico and Cuba would pop in via tropo. I even have some pictures from some of that stuff.

DE
 
Noticing some slight tropo conditions here in Tampa.

I got out the radio to listen to an FM station that drt asked me about on another thread about 98.1 and I was hearing two stations on that frequency depending where I held the radio.

I then started to scan the FM band and I noticed a station on 94.5 that's coming in with stereo on and off. It's classic rock 94.5 "The Arrow" from Ft. Myers.

That's not a normal catch here at all.
 
would that be "tropo lite"? We get a lot of that stuff in MA where one receives stations from 90 mi vs the usual 60. Or the weak one at 60 mi is quite strong.
 
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