So I was just sitting down with my coffee around 8am local time, had the radio on kind of as background noise while I was checking email, and all of a sudden I'm hearing stations on 6m like I've never heard before. Worked a couple guys in Florida from up here in Minnesota which honestly I wasn't expecting at all for this time of year. The band just opened up out of nowhere and lasted maybe 45 minutes before it was gone again.

Also saw someone mention the new Icom IC-905 has been showing up at a few dealers finally, anyone actually gotten their hands on one yet? I've been on the fence about it but man the specs look interesting for microwave work. Feels like there's been a lot of new gear dropping lately, between that and the new Yaesu stuff it's a good time to be paying attention I guess.

Anyway just wanted to share, keep your ears on 50MHz folks, the Es season seems to be ramping up early this year at least in my experience.

yeah same thing happened to me last week, completely missed it because I had the squelch set too tight and didn't notice until a buddy texted me. By the time I got on it was already fading. Ugh. One of these days I'll actually be ready when a good opening hits.

On the IC-905 thing, I saw a review video on youtube from a guy who got an early unit and it looked pretty impressive but he was having some issues with the remote head cable or something, might have just been a setup problem though. I dunno, the price point is pretty steep for me right now.

Nice catch on the Es. This time of year you can get some surprises, the solar flux has been running elevated and that tends to correlate at least loosely with more sporadic E activity even though the mechanism is still kind of debated. I've been logging the openings on DX Maps and there were a handful of good ones over the past two weeks across the midwest corridor.

The 905 is genuinely interesting hardware if you're doing any kind of weak signal microwave work. The integrated transverter design is clever. That said I'd probably wait a revision or two before dropping that kind of money, first production runs always have something that gets sorted out in later batches. Just my habit after getting burned once or twice over the years.