Someone asked my opinion about a scene in the movie, We Were Soldiers, where the RTO ginned up a doublet antenna for an AN/PRC-25 and copied a firefight in Viet-Nam into the American south. Could it have been done? The PRC-25's were FM at about 5 watts and in the 6 Meter band IIRC. In 1964, about the time of the events, the solar cycle was bottomed out but Sporadic-E propagation is seasonal and not dependent so much, if at all, on the solar cycle. Sporadic-E is the most common DX mode for 6 Meters. The best I've done on 6 Meters was about 5K miles to Uruguay at about 8 watts into a dipole variant. This was single sideband mode-more efficient than the FM PRCs. I've heard claims for trans continental with 5Watt FM handhelds so maybe it's possible. Any old RTOs out there have similar stories?
Tis a puzzlement
73 de Rob
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I worked with the 25/77 for many years as a Mariine communicator. While anything is possible, it is not very probable. We found with our comm gear that the HF stuff had the best possibility of that sort of "bounce". The transmission that they were supposedly hearing would not have been very likely either, unless the radio operator was just holding down the transmit button during the firefight.
ReplyDeleteThere is a file going around of a fire fight on a PBR where the mike was left keyed and someone in the TOC taped it, someone gets jammed up enough it can happen. Rob
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