What's in a Signal Report?

I've never been one to hang on signal reports, being constantly rather bemused by the anachronistic obsession with issuing them.

So far as I'm concerned, signal reports are unnecessary if the bloke on the other end doesn't tell me he's having difficulty hearing what I'm saying.


It's also true that, for reasons of habit and 'just being nice', signal reports are typically unreliable, and often exaggerated.  The classic case of someone who asks for you to repeat the suffix about eight times, only to then give you a '59' is well-known and rather funny.

Similarly with the digitial modes, where PSK and RTTY, largely as a result of stored macro 'overs', simply spew out the '599' that someone entered into the macro years ago, when your name is coming out on the other guy's screen as '7&di;mir' and the real report is more like '359'

Now, a lot of store and column inches is given over to signal reports, despite the clear problems highlighted above.  Until things like WSPR arrived a few years ago, a signal report was one of the principal ways of assessing antenna performance.  Reading some of that stuff today seems, well, very dated, not least because trying to derive statistically-valid conclusions from signal reports must have been more like guessing than science.

Yes, I can hear you...

A number of simple wire and vertical users across the pond have been my unwitting test subjects over the past year or so.  Pointing a 3-ele monobander their way, and with lots of ground gain to assist me, I've been handing out nice 57s, 58s and 59s.  All genuine reports, and no pre-amp switched in.

Usually, those same operators will give me, the one with the Yagi, a significantly worse report back - maybe 55 when they are 57 with me.

Now, simplistically speaking, you'd think they're just being spiteful and want to give me a report that makes them feel better.  For sure, that does sometimes happen.  But it isn't what's generally going on.

No, the fact that the wire user is getting a good signal report - or any report - is down to the ability of my antenna (and the ground gain) to concentrate the RF from that omnidirectional or zero-gain antenna.  Without my 14dBi (check out my QRZ.com page as to how that is achieved), that wire user may well remain undetectable.

Similarly, when I transmit, my beam and reflections are concentrating the puny 60W into something more akin to a kW, but the guy on the other end has no gain, or very little, so he can't concentrate what I am sending to him, like another Yagi user could.  Consequently, I get a lower signal report.

So, those people who worry their signal reports are "consistently 2 'S' points below those given out", you shouldn't necessarily feel bad, as much angst on the internet chat forums tends to suggest they do.  As more sensible people will comment, maybe it's "your antenna that's doing most of the work."  Quite.