so i was just sitting down with coffee saturday morning kind of half paying attention to the radio and suddenly 10 meters just absolutely came alive around 9am local. i mean i havent heard it that good since probably 2012 or so, had stations from south america, europe, even caught a couple JAs which i wasnt expecting at all. ran like 40 contacts in maybe an hour and a half before it started fading again. my modest wire antenna was doing way better than it has any right to do honestly.

also been seeing a lot of chatter on the mail lists about the new Icom IC-7760 or whatever its going to be called, supposedly a head-separable design that takes some cues from the 7300 but bumps up the power and has a cleaner front end. havent seen official specs yet but a few people who were at the Tokyo hamfair were posting about it. anyone have actual details or is this still all rumor at this point? the 7300 has been such a runaway hit i can see why theyd want to do something in that direction for the higher end market.

also reminder if anyone is in the northeast, the Rochester hamfest is coming up end of the month i think, always a good time to poke through the flea market tables even if you dont need anything.

yeah i caught the tail end of that opening, came on around 10:30 and it was already starting to drop off but still worked a couple EA stations which was nice. 10m openings like that really do remind you why people chased cycle peaks so hard back in the day. my old TS-430 was just singing.

on the Icom thing, i saw the same posts from Tokyo hamfair and from what i can piece together it sounds like its going to be a proper shack-in-a-box type deal where the head unit has all the controls and the RF deck sits somewhere else, kind of like the 7610 layout but taken further. price point rumored to be pretty steep but if the receiver is as good as the 7610 i could see it being worth it for serious contesters. personally im happy with what ive got but ill definitely be reading the first reviews carefully.

omg i totally missed that opening, was out doing yard work and didnt even have the scanner on. this is why i need to set up some kind of alert for when propagation gets good lol. do people actually use like DX cluster alerts for that or is there an app that does something similar? im still pretty new to HF, just got my general in june and im still figuring out when to actually be sitting at the radio vs not bothering.

also had no idea there was a Rochester hamfest coming up, might try to make it out if its on a sunday, where do you usually find the schedule for those things, is it on the ARRL site?