For most of the year 6 meters seems catatonic, at least to those of us with mortal-scale antennas. But then there are times, like right now, where a magic mirror appears in the sky, capriciously reflecting signals all other place. It’s called “sporadic-E.”
When the magic is happening, even those with modest antennas, tuned for 6 meters or not, can get in on the fun. What I do is park my K3S or KX3 at 50.125 USB with the squelch turned on, in case someone starts calling CQ above the noise. With both rigs, you can turn on “CW-in-SSB” mode in the CW WGHT menu entry, allowing you to either use SSB or CW as required. (A lot of cross-mode happens on this band since QSB--fading--can come up without warning, leading some ops to switch from SSB to CW to finish a QSO.) A great tool that has been mentioned here before is dxmaps.com, which gives you a snapshot of activity on any band of your choice, or all bands, or certain subsets. You can sign up to get alerts emailed to you when a band of interest gets interesting. I’ve had multiple alerts each of the past several days -- ’tis the season. 73, Wayne N6KR ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
