January 22nd, 2020

Tonight I met Salvo, DK3SE, in the ON4KST chat. Salvo recently became QRV again on 13 cm. He uses a 1.8 m dish and has about 50 W at the feed. As his location is on the southern slopes of the Black Forrest, our direct path is blocked by solid rock. Even aircraft scatter is very hard to perform.
So we tried to find a reflective point at the mountain range of the Alps, but that was not very satisfying as well. Next step was to try side scatter on airplanes to the east of the Black Forrest.

We tried on a couple of planes and, as expected, on the ones, we saw the same side of the body, we received strong reflections. So we learnt, in side scatter the orientation of the plane matters! This is in opposite to the usual aircraft scatter, where the planes just have to be on the path and the bottom side of the aircraft is used as reflector.