I worked three contacts on my MFJ "Adventure Radio" today on 6m SSB including two VE7s.
Cost of the radio ?
$100.
Cost of the antenna ?
Whatever a spool of #12 wire costs at Home Depot.


You techs should be all over this. Being a ham isn't all about FM and repeaters.

+1 and very good to know

I only have a 6m HT (though I can probibly borrow a radio from the comm shop that works AM on the 6m band)

thanks for the heads up- think we can do HI to the mainland?

-Roth

Propagation on six meters is very interesting and is something that you should look into. Especially living in HI.

Normally, on HF, propagation occurs via the F layer of the ionosphere. The maximum usable frequency has to be high enough to reflect the radio wave back to earth. If you check out the maximum usable freqency, it is no where high enough to support 6 meter activity (yesterday that is, it does get high enough to support 6 meter activity at the peak of the sunspot cycle). So the waves arn't being reflected by the ionosphere. So, obviously something else is reflecting the radio wave. In the Spring we have sporatic E and this is what was giving us propagation yesterday on 6. There was an ionized cloud between Nevada and Southern Canada. There just as easily could be an ionized cloud between HI and the mainland.
Yet another form of propagation that you might encounter is Tropospheric Ducting.
"This type of propagation in the most active in tropical areas and near large bodies of water where QSOs with stations located over 2500 km away are regularly worked. When exceptional conditions occur, contacts with antipodes have already been established in VHF on 6 and 2 m."


When these band conditions exist, power and antennas arn't all that imporatant. I was running this radio which as you see, runs 10 watts PEP. I bought it used on-line for $100 (I think). The antenna is nothing more than a piece of wire run around the perimeter of my roof (single story house) and fed with ladder line into a tuner. I use this same antenna/tuner set-up on all bands 6m-160m. One station outside of Vancouver told me I was booming in at 59 with great audio.

I don't know what mode your 6m HT runs but I would assume it is FM ???
The 6 meter FM calling freqency is 50.300 (West Coast) and 50.400  on AM. Dial that freq into your rig and sit there and listen. Here is some more good info on 6 meters in general: www.qsl.net/n2ffl/6meter.htm

Thank you for that info- I also need to look into it because our VHF comm (for the miltiary) runs 30-90 mhz roughly. Learning how to make that comm more reliable for us is something I've been trying to teach to our new ROs here.


HT is a T90A (FM).... though I'm hoping to get a mobile HF rig here in the near future (if I can ever afford it )

-Roth

Ahhh...the 'Magic Band'. Ya never know.