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I am totally new to HF, but I've started playing around with listening to the bands on |
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Welcome to HF!! I agree with Jack. SSB (Phone) is a bit harder then CW because you don't know what the person actually sounds like. Do they have a deep voice or a higher voice? As long as you are close, they should be able to hear/understand you and you them and that is what matters. Often, folks will be on .0, .25, .5 or .75 if there's no contest going on but Jack correctly points out that what is .0 for you might not be exactly what is .0 for someone else. They should be close +/- .1 usually. CW is usually easier because that's a consistent tone. Some radios even have a feature that will auto zero beat the other station as long as it's strong enough for the radio to hear it. Sometimes if there's a pileup, being a bit off their frequency makes you sound different enough that they might distinguish you calling from other stations that are all right on top of him on his frequency. That's something to consider and what you'll learn from experience as you work the bands. When they are working split they often are tuning slightly within the split range that they announce looking for a strong or distinct call to come out from the pileup. If they are a DXpedition and say they are working up 5-10, then they are looking 5khz up from where they are all the way up to 10khz up and they are tuning within that range so there's no exact frequency to be on in that situation. K2DSL - David |
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BEST match you will ever have is your own ears,tune your vfo to what sounds normal to you.very few hams worldwide do not center on zero freq. but move in all band spectrum up or down.you can also listen to others calling so fine tuning is no problem if they are working the desired station.biggest problem i see is their transmitter/reciever not correctly aligned,yours may not be aligned so you tune them at odd spots on your vfo,be sure your rig is properly aligned so get a tune up if needed.cw has same, as a signal can be anywhere you detect it,bottom line we are not channelized and transmit all through a band anywhere we choose,finding the correct freq. on a split operation will be your biggest challenge in that they may be up or down 2-10 khz for hearing your call.hard to fool your ears as their is no set procedure other than what you was born with. |
