Part D:

Aiming The HF Beam

Updated 8/22/2013

World Map
Centered on
Nome, Alaska

Many people think New York is to the southeast of Nome, or that Europe is east of us, or Africa to the southeast.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If you have a world globe, and pull a string from Nome to, say, New York, you will see the angle is East Northeast.

Hams (and globe circling pilots) do not use the regular Mercator Projection maps. They are useless. Instead, a map with the world as seen from  your  location is used. This type of map is called an Azimuthal Equidistant Projection.

In the good old days, you could only get them centered on Topeka, Kansas, useless for us here in Alaska.

You can actually print out these maps from sites on the internet. Some fancier than others. The one above is perfectly adequate if you know your geography. Can you spot Kenya? Or Turkey? If you are not sure, better maps are available. You can even get them printed out for you with all sorts of additional information, color, ham radio prefixes, beam bearings and distances to those places etc. I am told that Google Earth might even do this, albeit not optimized for ham radio.

You can find all sorts of good info at:

• General Info on DX Zone's Web Site
• Above map as generated by OK2PBQ -- in Czeckoslovakia.

And now you know why those Jets bound from New York to Tokyo fly overhead!

Copyright 2013, Ramon Gandia