Rack, I don't know if you ever used BTB's, Blind Transmission Broadcasts, but when you talk about falling asleep to the sound of white noise...imagine manually scanning a range of freqs for 12 straight hours listening for the cleanest frequency. As an aside, the guys who took the time to learn HF, regardless of their age, those were the ones who could make commo with anything. A guy who didn't put much or any thought into HF could mess up SATCOM. I "get" why SATCOM is preferred, especially to someone living out of a ruck, but HF will always be there. SATCOM nets are so saturated these days we're using comercial birds for a great deal of our data transmissions. The reality is that even when things work well SATCOM isn't a given. Threads like this almost make me want to re-enlist.
NVIS is hard to locate within the cone for a few reasons 1. Steep takeoff angle (not a major problem in itself) where most of the radiation is upward (not all of it due to radiation off the feed line and nearby objects, plus no TX antenna is perfect). 2. The reflection off the ionosphere and downward to an airplane or ground based system will dominate over the direct wave and will be correlated with the direct wave making it difficult (not impossible) to process and in most cases the loss over the NVIS path is much less than the direct wave suffers making the problem even harder 3. Faraday (polarization) rotation of the signal as it reflects off the ionosphere distorts the signal and creates a changing polarization at the receiver (that whoop whoop whoop fading sound you hear). But all is not lost it can be done, google ARD-15 which was flown on the L-20 aircraft before most of the forum members were born. BTW the term NVIS (not NVIS itself) is believed to have been coined by a US Army Radio Physicist who worked for the Signal Corps Labs
Yeah we had a few elpa, should still be in the system. Awesome bit of kit but I found they got a bit twitchy if you weren't talking elpa to elpa.
Most of the time the HF net was just a "Guard" net and rarely used. I mostly used it to scan for BBC broadcasts to kill the time and the silence in the back of the CP at night.
