.................wanted to be a politician and even if I did, I don't think I could be as my button's a bit on the small side and I'm not sure if it works any more !
Well, then, maybe you would make an excellent politician, @Bill Morrison-Bates , because you woudn’t be starting any nuclear wars with that button.
Sporadic E or Es is a propagation mode via the ionosphere which can allow VHF signals (30-300 MHz) to propagate over long distances via a reflection from the E layer. Sporadic E is generally classified into three types by, Mid-latitude, Equatorial and Auroral. Easy when you know how innit ?
@Bill Morrison-Bates Traditional T-V transmission was done using A.M. for picture information, and F.M. for the audio portion. How is it being done today? How is each "frame" produced on today's T-V sets, using LCDs or LEDs? Has "scanned" lines been dumped for some new concept of recreating an image? Not being smart or facetious; I really would love to learn more, and your post indicates understanding of the principles involved. When I studied Television at DeVry Technical Institute in 1962 as a young man, solid-state T-V was only a glint in visionaries' eyes. Frank
Sporadic E ( or skip as CBers used to call it) caused by large patches of ionization in the E-layer of the ionosphere. The exact cause of these patches is not well known, but they are associated with wind shears and some peeps think they are connected with high altitude thunder storms.
My brother was an enthusiastic CBer. I remember him saying that, under certain circumstances, he could talk to people from vast distances. I doubt if he knew anything about Sporadic E, though.
My dad was a lineman for our local electric company, and the radio they used to talk from the home office to the linemen out in the trucks was probably more of a ham radio frequency, and it reached for long distances, although I can remember it breaking up pretty bad sometimes, when I was with my dad and we were way out in the hills somewhere to fix the power line. He told us about one day when the sip must have been bad. He received a transmission about a power outage, but the location was one that he had never heard of; so he asked them for more information. After chatting back and for wor a while, he realized that it was not our local power company calling him, and he had connected with another power company that used the same radio frequency. I think it was in Ohio, or someplace that was a long ways away from North Idaho.
I was A CBer, worked at a number of jobs for a Class A Electrical Utility, while going to school worked in the evenings as dispatcher operating their radios, usually only busy in the evenings during high winds, electrical storms and tornados (gave me a chance to study when it was quite). Had a friend who was a Ham operator. He was always busy during any kind of emergency and had friends or compadres all across the country he commutated with. He suggested one time I should learn and get my license. I was too dumb, and it was more complicated than most other things I had thought of or attempted. But I know on some commercial radios and CBs under certain weather conditions, one often got transmissions far distances away.