160 METERS...



160 METER LISTENING LOOP

160 METER CTSVR

This band is particularly challenging, and almost exclusively CW for DX. Not too much armchair DXing with the speaker blaring here! Oftentimes it's "put on the headsets and hold your breath" to hear the stations.

My antenna for 160 is a 32 foot (10 meter) tall Unihat CTSVR (Capacitive Top Short Vertical Radiator) that I reserve for this band. If you don't have high structures or trees from which you can hang a good 160 meter antenna, and you can afford the required 25 by 25 foot real estate, I can certainly endorse this antenna. The CTSVR is sold as a 160/80/40 meter antenna. It has been a proven performer on 160 and 40 meters for me. I find the 80 meter portion to be narrow-banded for my use and I'm exploring other antennas for that band.

I've put up a 160 listening loop and, although this works very good for nulling out the noise during a contest, I still find that I can "hear" the DX better by listening through the static crashes on my vertical. I know I would considerably improve my receive situation with Beverage antennas and I plan to do that in the future (I must "borrow" some land that's not mine). So far though, this setup has netted me 114 confirmed countries on 160, as shown on the map.

160 METER CONTACTS You have to be an early riser to do well on this band. A good deal of the "juicy" activity occurs during GRAYLINE propagation. Grayline examples are: you're experiencing sunset and the DX is in darkness; you're experiencing sunrise and the DX is in darkness; DX has sunrise or sunset with you in darkness. For a very interesting paper on Grayline Propagation CLICK HERE to go to the NG3K website then click BACK on your browser to come back to this page.

As an experiment, I took all my 160 meter contacts and treated them as if they had happened during a single night, then mapped them according to local time. You can readily see how "time dependent" contacts on this band can be.

Click to select specific map for stated timeframe:

Sunset to 9:00 PM
9:00 PM to Midnight
Midnight to 3:00 AM
3:00 AM to Sunrise

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