What Band?

[Dennis David]

Hi,

I'm new to Ham radio and I am interested in communicating with people in Central America. Is there one band over another that is more popular? What should I be looking for?

[cruiserlarry]

Hi,

I'm new to Ham radio and I am interested in communicating with people in Central America. Is there one band over another that is more popular? What should I be looking for?

Do you have a General or Extra license ? If not, you'll need to work on acquiring a license upgrade before you'll be able to communication on international (HF - high frequency) ham bands.

I think Xstatik and Steeve-O are better equipped to directly address your question, but I'll try to help. Aside from the obvious equipment and license issues, different bands are effective at different times of the day, seasons of the year, and can be attenuated or enhanced by various weather conditions and sunspot cycles...so there isn't just one band that will work, or any band that will work all the time - that's part of the challenge and excitement of ham radio, and HF communications in general.

What radio / antenna system(s) are you able to use ?

[xtatik]

Dennis,
Have a look at this web link. When you open it you'll need to look for the hide/unhide option. Click to show the map. It will take a few moments to fill in as info comes off the TelNet of contacts being made. It has a color coordinated (by band) scheme that will show you when, where and on what band contacts are being made globally by radio. Also, as you pass your cursor over the callsigns in the lower page it will give you the countries of origin.

http://www.dxwatch.com



BTW, your website is great!

[Dennis David]

Thanks,

DX Watch looks like an awesome tool.

I understand the license part and am working towards that. Just doing some research for now and the portable antennas I was looking at seemed to be band specific so that led me to ask the question regarding what band seemed to have the most activity with Hams from Central America.

[xtatik]

Thanks,

DX Watch looks like an awesome tool.

I understand the license part and am working towards that. Just doing some research for now and the portable antennas I was looking at seemed to be band specific so that led me to ask the question regarding what band seemed to have the most activity with Hams from Central America.

You're primarily going to find 20m activity running from early morning and well into the night at this time of year. Simply put, 20m all day long. 15m will see activity from midday and into the evenings. At night, as I mentioned 20m can continue into the night and well after the grey line with a lot of polar path activity into the Russian and European mornings. Looking south you'll continue to have 20m activity throughout the Caribe regions and into South America but it won't hold up as long, maybe an hour after actual nightfall. At that point you switch to 40m and everything north, south and east that is under nightfall can become available much like 20m works during the day.
80m and 160m can occasionally reach out, but not as often, and are strictly night bands. You'll find a lot of the old timers hanging out on these two bands bragging or strategising on DX and contesting, but very little actually taking place. It's mostly stateside ragchew stuff.
Hope this helps.

[Dennis David]

Thanks again.