Chris Newport wrote in
:

Coastguard stations around the world are generally blessed with
serious antenna farms and excellent professional receivers. They
are therefore well equiped to hear you if there is a signal to be
heard.


Not without a cooperating ionosphere, which hasn't been cooperating of
late.

What serious antenna farm have you been to? Their receiving antenna is a
whip! Their transmit antennas go from a whip to a conical monopole at the
10KW stations. Serious antenna farm!

Those silly hams are running 1.5KW PEP, when necessary, into an amazing
array of beam antennas both receiving and transmitting. The average Icom,
Yaesu or Kenwood receiver at any ham station has 2 or 3 HF SSB bandwidths
with digital signal processing of both IF and audio. CG had an old blue
display Commercial HF receiver, last time I went from base to base
calibrating their test equipment a few years back. What ultra-sensitive
receivers are they using today? Those ham rigs have 120 db crystal-sloped
IF skirts and .1 uV receivers. The receivers are so sensitive we have to
have an attenuator to protect them from atmospherics.

Back to the antenna problem.....

Let's say there's 50 hams in USA and Canada monitoring MMSN at noon,
tomorrow. The furthest East is in Nova Scotia. The furthest South is in
West Palm Beach. The furthest West is in Honolulu. The other 50 have
their sensitive little Yaesus listening every few hundred miles in between.
So, their "effective receiving antenna" is VERY well distributed across a
wide area of two countries, maybe even Europe and Asia at times.

CG has...well....8 to 10 whip antennas on each frequency....all right along
the COAST with nothing in between?

Which receiving system has a better chance of hearing out little backstay
transmitter, 180 miles off the Georgia coast??

PS - 22 hams KNOW they can hear me because they heard me and wrote down my
callsign on their desk pad when I did my useless chit-chat checkin.....(c;