Advice requested plz

[welshmonitor]

Hi, im not exactly a newbie as i been monitoring for a while but felt akward asking this question elsewhere on the site, my question is :- when monitoring hf freqs how do people here know what freqs to listen to? For example someone may post a topic saying that 6761 is active, i read the topic a few hour later an park my receiver on the freq for hours and hear nothing, this has happened many times. Is there some knack knowing what freq will be active or is it just sheer luck that you hear something on a freq your monitoring? Thanks for any replies and sorry if the question seems dumb, but its something thats bugged me for a while now

[hregor]

Hi
That's a very good question, one I've been thinking of asking myself.

I've only recently got back into HF, having bought a Wellbrook loop, which has got rid of the local noise that made me pack up HF in the first place. Providing the signals are fairly strong, I find that I can turn up the AF gain on the receiver and turn down the RF gain until the receiver is almost silent and Shanwick and Santa Maria just pop up out of the silence. This makes monitoring a lot less tiring. The aircraft is often a lot weaker and I need to turn up the RF gain to hear it.

The output of the Welllbrook is amplified within the aerial, so that with a splitter I can connect several radios to it, all on different frequncies. Having only two ears and one brain, when it gets busy you can't listen to them all. I've usually got one set on 5680 for Kinloss.

What I do is keep an eye on FC for any Heads Up coming from Rich or any of the others with their crystal balls, like the eastbound B52's the other day, and monitor the likely frequencies. 5616 during the day and 2899 at night are good for aircraft registered west of 30W, so that's where any US aircraft is likely to be when crossing the Atlantic. Obviously 6761 needs watching if there's going to be any AAR.

I'm an AOR fan and have a couple of AR5000's together with the SDU5600 spectrum display unit and an AR7030. The AR7030 is the best radio for HF but very unfriendly to drive. On one of the AR5000's I've loaded all of the frequencies in Rich's stickies in the HF section of FC, together with all the civil HF ATC frequencies, Stockholm radio and the Volmets, over 200 in total, in frquency order. Using the main tuning knob on the FR5000 I can spin through all of them quite quickly and get an impression of what is happening. It would be nice to be able to scan automatically but I can't see a way of doing it. What would be good would be to be able to scan HF channels like we do the U and V.

I've also loaded a channel bank with just the local HF, FOST, Kinloss and Tascomm and the usual US ones and the NATA,B,C,D,E and F channels in group order. This is useful when they're changing from day to night frequencies and they're both in use. Again I spin through those manually using the tuning knob.

The spectrum analyser is very handy for spotting activity on adjacent channels without retuning.

I also use the FR5000's for scanning U or V airband and the VHF weather satellites.

After all that I think a large amount of luck comes into it, plus experience which I don't have yet but will come with time. The other thing is to accept that you're never going to hear it all!

I look foreward to seeing what ideas the others have.

Roger

Edit its 200 channels not 300, my spreadsheet shows repeats for multiple sharers.

[POL]

http://www.liveatc.net/downloads/NAT-HF-Guidance.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Pages 35 to 40 shows the hours of operation for the various frequencies

[hregor]

Hi Chris
Yes the information is already out there, this link is posted in th HF forum, the problem is how best to use it. I've just had one spin through my 300 odd channels and found Shannon Volmet on 3413 and 5505 and RAF Volmet on 5450, Tascomm talking to Ascot 5150 about weather for CYYT,CZQX and CYJT, Stockholm radio on 8930 and some Dutch traffic on 5725. Also 8992 is active. The Volmets are a good indicator of conditions, later on Gander and New York will appear.

I think this is a better method than just free tuning, although you're not going to find any new frequencies this way, so don't discount free tuning completely. Not so very different from V and U really.

Roger

[POL]

Roger, I was responding to the original request asking how to tell what times frequencies were active. I'm not really in to HF, so to be totally honest I haven't a clue what you're now talking about, sorry!

Edit: Spelling fixed!

[hregor]

Hi Chris

I didn't mean to sound so superior, so sorry for that. What I was trying to emphasise is that the frequencies are all published and haven't changed for years, it's how best to monitor them, given the vagaries of HF.

The other thing to say is, when you do find something, post it. When I stumbled across Rescue Magic84 the other day it was great to have everybody finding news feeds to see what was really happening, checking other frequencies etc and I learnt an awful lot from the discussion afterwards. I'm not deeply into spotting, its the comms that I like, but the knowledge of these guys is outstanding.

Roger

[POL]

Hi roger,
Didn't sound like that at all, no worries

I think it was a case of I gave the literal answer ("What frequency and when?") and you gave a more detailed answer about if/when you can hear certain things