so i dont know if everyone caught the announcement but Icom put out some info about a new HF rig that supposedly addresses some of the complaints people had about the 7300 price point, havent seen the full specs yet but the chatter on a couple other forums has been pretty enthusiastic. take that with a grain of salt obviously since we've been burned before by pre-release hype.

anyway thats almost secondary to what ive been experiencing on 10 meters this past week. the band has just been absolutely open in a way i havent seen in maybe a couple years, worked a bunch of south american stations yesterday afternoon with pretty modest power, like 50 watts into a dipole and guys were coming back to me like i was running a kw. solar flux has been climbing and it shows.

anyone else noticing propagation improving across the higher HF bands? feels like we might actually be getting somewhere interesting with this solar cycle. curious what others are hearing out there.

yeah 10m has been something else this week. i was just casually spinning the dial tuesday evening not expecting much and ran into a pileup on 28.495 that turned out to be a station in Argentina, jumped in and got him on like the third call which honestly never happens to me. my antenna situation is nothing special either, just a vertical with a mediocre ground plane.

the Icom thing im cautiously interested in. if they can get something competitive under $1000 that doesnt feel like they cut every corner it would shake things up a bit. the 7300 was already a game changer when it came out so i trust them to at least make something solid. but yeah, wait and see i guess.

oh wow i had no idea 10m was doing that, im still pretty new and mostly been hanging around 40m since thats where my club told me to start. might have to tune around up there and see whats happening. what time of day were you guys finding it most open? mornings, afternoons?