Picking up ATC from 300 NM away? Frequency bleed?

"Peter R." wrote in message
s.com...
Last night while flying from Teterboro, New Jersey up to Ithaca, NY, I was
talking to Bingamton approach (located in south central NY state) and
cruising at 8,000 ft.

On the frequency there were several calls from aircraft but not one was
answered by ATC. At first I thought the controller was missing the calls,
but then I heard one of the calls quite clearly: "Akron-Canton Approach,
this is ..." Akron-Canton is located in Ohio, about 300 NM away from my
position and sure enough, they share the same frequency as Binghamton
approach.

After mentioning the call to the controller, he responded that there had
been some complaints of what he called "frequency bleed" the last few
days.

Is this pretty common? What causes it?

--
Peter



This is most likely troposphere ducting. This summer has been very good for
VHF propagation. I have in the ham radio bands (144MHz) made contacts from
my home in Illinois all the way out to Vancouver and east to New Hampshire.
Granted the Vancouver contact was not through the ducting mode as I
mentioned before but through meteor scatter. In that mode we actually bounce
radio waves off the ion trail of meteor entering the atmosphere. On some of
the lower frequencies (50MHz close to TV channel 2) it has been possible to
make very long haul comms with small amounts of power on an almost daily
basis.

'Frequency bleed' is a non-sensical term and has no real meaning other than
something laymen would use to describe an observation they do not understand

Hope that helps without getting to technical.
--
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Scott F. Migaldi, K9PO
MI-150972
PP-ASEL
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