so i was just sitting down with coffee yesterday morning and figured id do a quick scan on 10 meters before work and holy cow there was actual propagation happening, i worked like 6 stations in South America inside of 20 minutes which almost never happens from my QTH in the midwest. havent seen 10m that alive since maybe 2022? felt like the cycle 25 predictions are finally starting to pan out for real this time.

anyway that got me excited enough to start poking around online and i saw Icom apparently teased some kind of new handheld or maybe a mobile rig, the post i saw was a little vague but it looked like it might be a dual band with some updated DSP features. anybody else see that or have more details? the rumors have been floating around for a few months now and im curious if this is actually real or just the usual forum speculation stuff. feels like its been a while since they released anything that wasnt just a firmware tweak on an existing radio.

also completely unrelated but the ARRL phone sweepstakes is coming up and i cant decide if i want to seriously try to compete or just hand out some points. last year i did like 4 hours and burned out pretty quick, might just be more relaxed about it this year.

yeah that 10m opening was legit, i caught the tail end of it around noon and worked a couple EU stations which I honestly was not expecting on a Tuesday. my buddy in Texas said he was hearing South Pacific stuff earlier in the morning too. the solar flux has been creeping up the last few weeks and i think we might finally be getting closer to the peak, been a long time coming.

on the Icom thing, what i read suggested it might be a successor to the 51A series but honestly take that with a grain of salt because ive been burned by that kind of speculation before. remember when everyone was sure there was going to be a new HF portable and it turned out to be a firmware update lol. i'll believe it when i see an actual product page. that said if they do release something new with decent battery life and maybe DMR capability i would probably look pretty seriously at it.

for sweepstakes just do what feels fun, i spent one year going hard at it and wrecked my voice for a week, not worth it unless you're really in it to win it

wait 10 meters was actually open?? i had my radio on all morning doing paperwork and heard basically nothing, now im wondering if i had a setting wrong or something. this is like the 3rd time ive missed an opening this month and its starting to bug me. might need to just leave a wideband scan running so i dont keep missing these things.

im still pretty new so i dont really have a good feel yet for when to expect propagation on the higher bands, is there a good resource for predicting openings or do people mostly just check after the fact?