so i was at work when apparently 10 meters just absolutely lit up last thursday afternoon, saw a bunch of posts about it after the fact and was pretty bummed because ive been waiting for a decent opening on that band for like two months now. my antenna situation isnt great for anything below 20m but 10m i have a pretty solid dipole up and it just... never opens when im home.

anyway aside that i did catch a little bit of the tail end around 6pm local and managed a couple of south american stations which was nice but nothing crazy. was anyone else on during the peak? curious what was getting worked because the cluster was going nuts from what i could see on pskreporter after the fact.

also seen some chatter about the new icom ic-905 actually starting to ship to dealers in more places, anyone here actually gotten hands on one yet? the microwave bands stuff is way outside my current budget but still interesting to follow

yeah i caught about 45 minutes of that opening and it was something else, had europe coming in S9 on the vertical which almost never happens for me this time of year. worked a handful of italian stations and one guy in greece who had a massive signal. the solar flux has been creeping up lately so hopefully this becomes more regular as we head further into the cycle. dont give up on it, just keep the radio on in the background when you can and have the cluster alerts set up, thats the only way i ever catch these things during the week

on the IC-905 thing, my buddy at the local radio club actually got to play with one at a hamfest last month and said the receiver is really impressive but the price tag made him wince pretty hard lol. i think for most of us the microwave bands stuff is kind of a niche within a niche but its cool that icom is doing something different. most of the news i follow lately has been about the FT-710 used prices dropping which is more in my wheelhouse honestly