Trying out ‘long path’.

My curiosity was whetted by a recent conversation with an Australian operator (via Echolink), who said he had had many HF QSOs with stations in Britain, beaming ‘long path over the North Pole’. Apparently that’s what they said. Now, looking at a Great Circle map, it’s obvious to see that beaming directly over the Pole from here will take your signals on the shortest great circle path available to the North Island of New Zealand, missing great circle to VK by about 45 degrees. Did ‘long path’ therefore mean something other than what I thought it must? I asked around.

No, according to everyone I asked, the simple answer to this simple question was that ‘long path’ was 180 degrees away from the apparent shortest great circle path. So heaven knows what these other ops were talking about.

So today I decided that as I was awake early I would…