wet terrain or dry vs. local signal?

[VE7NOT]

I started out on 11m before I got my ham ticket and still do use it for family communication.. During that time i noticed an interesting trend. This trend seemed to followed on 'local' ham bands such as 160 and 80.

(I realized 160 and 80 are capable of good dx but they tend to be used more for evening local qso within 300 miles or so)

I live on an island. The climate is damp and a steady rain season runs from october to march. The trees are often dripping with water. Locally despite mountains surrounding me i find rancge to be quite a bit about most textbooks.

While most will point out i live near the pacific ocean and thus have a 'conductor' running down the whole west coast.. I have observed spectacular 11m as well as 10m and 15m to cities removed from that water.

Now the flip side. I spent a year in medicine hat alberta. The climate is cold but dry ajd the terrains surrounding the city is dry bunchgrass, no trees. No mountains so that meant easier local contacts right?? Wrong!

I had a hard time even working 3 miles on the cb 11m band.. I tried my sw receiver (I wasn't allowed hf tx privlages then) and found result disturbing on all bands. While 20 seemed normal I found 80 and 160 dead. 80 picked up rocky mt stations in montana but not much else. 160 was dead.

I tried 2m thinking that without mountians and trees my range would be greater. I was surprised to find 'weak repeaters' only 25 miles away (yes it was the same antenna and transceiver)

Even more disturbing was UHF... while i never used 70cm I did use frs at times and here on the island I can often bring in a 4 mile range with 1/2 watt.. Sadly i didn't got more then a mile out in the 'desert' before my range suffered.

So to sum up has anyone ever noticed a wet climate vs. dry climate local range difference?

[w8cbc]

For V/U, you have to consider tropo effects. I learned lots about that in my years in northern Ontario. Cold and dry over flat ground generally means little to no enhancement. Warm and moist weather on the other hand brought with it an almost continual extension beyond the standard radio horizon and a fairly reliable path across Lake Huron. Inversions, common in the summer there, meant a pipeline to Toronto, 200 mi. to the south. Now this was all from FM broadcast listening and TVDX as I wasn't licenced then. But it would apply handily to 2 metres and 70 cm.

I would expect that in moist, temperate country you'll usually be getting the enhancement, and inversions are common in mountain valleys as well so you're getting a fair advantage by living where you do. On the cold, dry plains, you'd be getting to the radio horizon and not much more. Add to that - if you can see a mountain, you can bounce a signal off it. Ever listen to FM in the interior valleys? The multipath gets incredible. In Trail, I could see the local CBC relay, but the signal was all fuzzed up no matter how I oriented the aerial. All those mountains on Van Is. and the coastal mainland would be a help at any rate. Then we get into knife-edge diffraction and so on. The possibilities are endless.

Now, for shortwave and mediumwave (160 metres). It probably has to do with your ground system as much as anything else. Moist/wet ground is generally better as it is more conductive. It helps if you have a lake to throw part of your ground system into such as I did last week, hee. Essentially, the more you have to push against, the more effective your aerial is going to be.

I'm not sure as to an ungrounded system, such as receive-only or mobile R/T. I understand that a conductive ground helps by just being there and know that groundwave for one propagates much better over water and moist ground than it does over dry but am not sure of the details as to why. I'm sure others could chime in with the whys (and I'd be interested, since "why" is my favourite question).

[K8ERV]

Water is bad stuff, never use it---

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo