so ive been checking into a couple nets on sunday evenings and honestly its become kind of a ritual for me at this point. been doing the local club net on 2m for about a year and a half now and recently found a regional HF net on 40m that meets at 7:30pm local. its been a great way to just stay sharp and have some actual QSOs instead of just monitoring all the time.

anyway i was wondering if anyone here knows of other nets worth checking into, doesnt have to be sunday specifically. im also curious about special event stations — i stumbled across one last week for some historical anniversary and worked them on 20m, got a really nice QSL card in the mail a few weeks later. didnt even know those were a thing until recently. is there like a calendar somewhere people use to find them? i know about the ARRL website but the listings there can be kind of hard to navigate

the WA7BNK net finder and the QRZ special event page are both worth bookmarking, i check them pretty often. also the ARRL special event list does get updated regularly, you just have to dig around a bit to find the current month. for nets specifically i got into the habit of checking the ARRL net directory — you can filter by band and mode which is handy.

sunday nights i usually hit the 75m ragchew net around here, its pretty informal, people just chat for an hour or two. not everyone gives a signal report, some folks just talk about whats going on. if youre used to the structured check-in format it feels a little loose at first but i actually prefer it now. there's also the ARES net in our section on monday evenings if you ever want to try an emcomm-type net, those run a bit more formal with NCS and everything but good practice.

oh man special event stations are so fun once you get into them, i got completely obsessed for a while and was chasing every one i could find. there was one for a lighthouse event last summer and the pile-ups were crazy, took me like 45 minutes to get through on 17m. totally worth it though.

for nets i mostly do CW nets now because im trying to get my speed up, there are some slow-speed ones that are super welcoming if you're still building confidence with code. the FISTS club has some good ones. but yeah the sunday evening thing is very real, theres something nice about having a regular schedule to look forward to