Hi all, and thank you for your answers. I think we have some good experiments on the go...
Le 09/09/2021 à 22:38, Pierre Emeriaud a écrit :
There used to be a few (PTT&military) links between Corsica & continental France, some as early as 1947[0,1], although way down around 100MHz[1].
Yes, but their dishes had more than decent diameters, HI :-) We often used their 50 meters tower as a support for our low band dipoles during HF contests :-) This tower has been dismantled 10 years ago, but it was already offline when I got my ham license in the 1990s. A similar tower with two parabolic antennas can still be seen on a hill in the middle of the city of Bastia. That's the first thing you see from the harbor, HI :-) It was used to forward communications to the military Solenzara Air Base (also called the "Mediterranean aircraft carrier"), on the south east coast of the island. Now, they are using submarine fiber optics :-) And we are using VPNs, over two "civilian" fiber pairs on the same fiber. A funny detail : due to its primary military function, this fiber does not appear on any public submarine fiber map. The main advantage for us is that in case of problems, it's repaired quickly :-)
Those areas have a huge advantage of having somewhat high mountains not that far from the sea. Quickly looking at radiomobile, there seems to be around 154dB of free space loss between Grasse (Le Haut Montet, alt 1330m) and Calenzana (Monte Grosso, alt 1900m) for a distance of 210km, with no obstruction from the curvature of earth.
Monte Grossu may not be the best location for a radio high point, unless you want to build a one-shot blitzortung.org receiver, HI :-) Our "usable" high points, over Bastia and Ajaccio, are 800-900m ASL, just over sea. Anyway, as Rob said in a previous message about "tropospheric ducting", higher locations may not be the better.
This may be an interesting project...
73 de TK1BI