The 'magic band' has always been associated with 50 MHz and its amazing propagation ... usually unpredictable and often without
logical explanation. This past summer saw an explosion of digital
FT8 activity
on 6m which has, for me (and for others I suspect), eliminated almost all of the
enjoyment I have found every year on this band.
With so much of the previous CW
and phone activity now gone to FT8, the 'feel' of the band is just not what it
once was. What I find puzzling is that so many have embraced this
weak signal
mode yet most of the two-way QSOs seem to be made between stations that can
easily hear each other ... often at the very strong levels produced by 6m
sporadic-E!
With FT8's inability to chat about antennas, rigs,
propagation, locations or simply to exchange names, for me the magic has gone.
Being able to hear signals build, fade up and down, or to
experience the sudden arrival of bone-crushing signals from the east coast where none had existed moments earlier, is all part of what attracted me to 6m decades ago. I
spent only a few hours on the band last summer, working a number of JA stations on FT8.
No particular sense of satisfaction was garnered ... working a JA opening on CW
is just way more exciting!
For many, the arrival of FT8 to the magic band has
opened a whole new world and from seeing so many unfamiliar call signs on 6m this
summer, it seems that FT8 has brought a lot of newcomers to the band. Unlike the JAs'
worked every summer on CW, almost all of the FT8 JAs' sent their QSL
immediately, with almost all excitingly indicating "
1st VE" ... so this has to
be a good thing! I suspect, that unless the level of conventional-mode activity
returns to previous levels on 6m (highly unlikely), my interest in 50MHz will slowly wane or vanish altogether ... but thankfully, there's still magic to be
found elsewhere on the ham bands!
As solar Cycle 24 draws down into its final
months, the deep lows that were experienced at the end of Cycle 23 are starting
to develop once again. For the past few weeks, propagation
below the broadcast
band has been the best it has been since the previous solar quieting.
Being
just below the bottom edge of the broadcast band, 630m (
472-479 kHz) has seen
some of the benefits of the recent round of stagnant geomagnetic activity.
While some transcontinental QSOs are regularly being made on CW, most contacts are being completed using the weak signal JT9 QSO mode. Contacts can often be completed just as the sun begins to set
and staying up into the wee hours to catch east coast DX is not a requirement.
Over the past few weeks my 'states worked' total has climbed to 30 and with a
couple of holdouts, the QSLs have been steadily arriving.
Last month's arrivals, in spite of the Canada Post delivery
disruptions, are shown below.
The recent great
propagation on 630m is well-demonstrated by last Saturday night's activity. For
the previous two evenings, my JT9 CQ's (as well as QSOs) were being decoded for
hours at a time by Rolf,
LA2XPA in Norway. He was also hearing Larry,
W7IUV,
located a few hundred miles to my southwest, on the other side of the Cascade mountains in Washington state. Both of our
signals would fade and trade places in Norway but often reaching audible CW
levels! The problem was that neither myself or Larry could see any of Rolf's
replies to us ... disappointing to us and frustrating for Rolf.
After an
hour of trying, I asked Rolf (via the
ON4KST LF chat page) what he was using for
a receive antenna. It turned out that his secret weapon was a 1000' beverage
pointed this way ... no wonder he was hearing so well. Larry, who was using a
shorter, easterly pointing BOG (
Beverage On Ground) for 630m receive, commented
that he also had a 1000' beverage pointed toward Europe but it was optimized for 160m
and doubted that it would work on 630. Just to make sure, he plugged it into a
second receiver and soon indicated that he 'might' have seen a weak JT9 trace on the
waterfall, close to Rolf's frequency.
One minute later Larry's comment
was just "
wow!" and the following minute he explained what had occurred. It
seems that the 'possible weak trace' had suddenly skyrocketed to a
-16db signal
... right at the edge of audibility! Larry and Rolf quickly exchanged signal
reports and "RRs" as the
first Europe-West Coast 630m QSO went into the history
books ... 'wow' indeed!
Rolf reported that at his end, Larry's already good signal suddenly shot
up to
-5db, an easily copied CW level, before fading away for the night. Larry
was pretty shocked at how quickly this strong short enhancement had occurred and
we all hoped that the oft observed 'spotlight' propagation seen on 630 would move
further west to VE7 ... but for now, it was not to be.
Earlier in the evening I
had commented to Larry about some previous quirky 630m propagation and had
suggested to him that it was probably just due to "the magic of radio" ... to
which he politely dismissed with "sorry no magic, just hard work and dumb luck". Looks like he was right on both accounts, but after Saturday's excitement I think he may now believe in a little magic as well!
I
really love old radio magazines, especially those from the 30's, but
to purchase any original copies today is very costly. If you grew up in
the 50's or earlier and became hooked by the magic of radio as I and
thousands of other kids did, then you no doubt recall the plethora of
great monthly magazines devoted to 'radio'. 
Just a few of the many magazines available are:
Radio Craft, Short Wave Radio, Radio, Radio World, White's Radio Log, Popular
Radio, Popular Electronics and Radio Amateur News, later to become Radio News.
So many of these early
publications were the brainchild of Hugo Gernsback, a prolific writer and editor
of both technical and science fiction magazines but sometimes blurring the
boundaries of each! I suspect that his wide variety of radio publications had
some significant role in the way radio so quickly transformed the world. 
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