On Sunday, Sep 11, 2016, M0JCQ/P was experimenting with low power. He was using a portable setup with a KX3.
James recorded the experiment. I like the nice country view, that can be seen near the end of the video.
With regard to the QSO, unfortunately, I did not record my end of the contact, so you have to guess what James sounded like…but with a few watts, his signal was well above the noise level and easily copied.
James had little noise, so with my power reduced to about 2 Watts, the signal was still readable, but near the comfort level, as James notices (and I do agree).
Here is the video:
The experiment shows that with proper conditions, contacts can be made with little power. At the other hand, it also shows that the WRC-15 allocation with only 15 Watts EIRP is next to nothing. One has to keep in mind that a dipole over ground has roughly 5 dBi gain towards the sky (NVIS propagation). If that gain is applied to the 15 Watts EIRP limit, the corresponding maximum output of the transmitter will be about 4-5 Watts.
With less than optimum conditions or higher noise levels, a decent QSO is practically impossible. Primary users will hardly notice that amateurs transmit…