so i was up late last night just scanning around and 6 meters was absolutely lit up with stations, heard a bunch of DX coming through from europe which i wasnt expecting at all for this time of year. caught a few JA stations too which was a nice surprise. propagation has been doing weird stuff lately and i cant tell if its just the solar cycle ramping up or something else going on.

anyway while i was messing around on PSKreporter watching the spots come in i saw someone in one of the facebook groups mention that Icom is supposedly announcing something new at a trade show next month. nobody seems to know exactly what it is but theres a lot of speculation its a new HF rig in the IC-7300 price range. i dunno how reliable that info is but figured id mention it here since people always seem to know stuff before it goes official.

anyone else been taking advantage of the 6m openings? curious what youre running for an antenna up there, im just on a 5 element yagi which feels pretty modest compared to some of the setups people talk about.

yeah the 6m opening last tuesday was something else, i had stations from western europe calling me back to back for like 45 minutes straight which almost never happens from here in the midwest. my IC-7610 was just pulling them in no problem. FT8 is kind of a mixed bag for me personally because i miss the old days of just working SSB on 6 but you cant argue with the results when the band opens like that.

as for the Icom thing, ive heard the same rumors. my money is on some kind of updated version of the 7300 with better filtering or maybe a built in panadapter improvement, but honestly they could surprise everyone. Yaesu has been pretty quiet too which always makes me nervous they're about to drop something. the last time both companies went quiet at the same time we got the FTDX10 announcement so who knows. keep your wallets ready i guess haha

im pretty new to HF, just got my general back in the spring, and i had no idea 6 meters could do that kind of thing. i thought it was mostly a local band? gonna have to read up on E-skip or whatever its called. what does a decent 6m yagi run these days, are we talking a few hundred bucks or more like a big investment