Most of us use the term "long path" rather loosely. In my case when the JA's
are strongest on my SE Beverage, I call it LP. That Beverage happens to be
aimed at 135 degress. However, because of the beamwidth of the Beverage, it's
not possible to resolve the "exact" direction with any certainty, so I refer to
directions in general terms, e.g. NE or SW. What is for sure is that on the
few occasions when I've observed LP JA's, there has never been a trace of a
signal from the SP direction, which is NW. I think you'll consistently find
the same thing reported by other observers of LP.
I have also worked many LP JA's on 80m and there is more evidence there that
the path certainly isn't anything close to SP. That's because a number of the
JA's worked on this path are using directional antennas and signals peak when
stations on both ends of the path are beaming in the general LP direction.
Sometimes the direction skews slightly east from my location, but it's never
close to SP.
On the half dozen or so occasions when I've seen LP JA's on 160, there has
always been good to excellent LP propagation to JA on 80 at the same time. The
same holds true for some of the other LP DX I've seen on 160 and 80. For this
reason I tend to believe there is a pretty good correlation between LP
propagaton on these two bands.
While it would be very interesting to know how the signals actually propagate
between the end points, in a sense it's academic. From a practical standpoint
we only need to know which direction to point our receiving and transmitting
antennas to work the stuff and let nature take care of the rest. :-)
73, John W1FV
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