Could it be that EA is just a bit too close Vic for sky wave? <snip...>
I was thinking along the same lines, Dave. Until I looked at a EU map. I know map projections produce distortions but in general, Northern Italy is closer to G than the northernmost part of Spain but all of Spain lies between the same latitudes as the remainder of Italy, so how come I get lotsa I stations all the way down to Sicily but nowhere near so many EA stations? The imbalance is odd. And skip zones change per band so I'm baffled.
I remember reading quite a while ago that transequatorial propagation isn't so grand from G and was just wondering if that can be generalised to southerly propagation rather than transeq. I'm probably revealing more ignorance than is comfortable but I am curious.
I started wondering about this propagation stuff when I made the miserable discovery that a number of cultural missions in Manchester have closed down. The Goethe Institut has closed, as has the Italian Cultural Institute: they were the best for learning German and Italian. I have a little German and can get by: I quite fancied a new challenge and Italian fitted the bill nicely but my only option now for Italian is expensive private lessons or University, which would be overkill.
There is still a Spanish cultural mission in Manchester and the daytime fees are reasonable but there seems little point in learning the language if I can't use it on air very often. Hence my enquiries. I do have a little Spanish but it's all mediaeval!
(Some decades ago I helped an amiable Spaniard who was working for his doctorate. He was working out of El Escorial and he needed help in setting up a way of codifying on computer old Spanish manuscripts on the travels of John of Burgundy. I was a bit of a computer buff and spent several weeks on the project, which was basically databasing.)
So, back to the question in hand: where do the EA stations congregate?
Vic