so i was just sitting down with my morning coffee yesterday and figured id spin the dial around 28mhz just for kicks, not really expecting anything since 10m has been so hit or miss lately. well i ended up working like 14 stations in about 45 minutes, a bunch of EU and even heard a couple JA stations coming through pretty solid. i havent had a 10m opening like that in years honestly. the cycle 25 stuff is really starting to show up now in a meaningful way.

also saw something about icom releasing some kind of updated firmware for the 7300 that supposedly tweaks the filtering options a bit? hasnt shown up on my radio yet but curious if anyone else has seen that. and did anyone catch the ARRL announcement about the changes to the field day rules they're floating for next year — not sure how i feel about the remote operating stuff personally but thats a whole other thread i guess.

anyway just wanted to see if others were getting into 10m this week or if i just got lucky with the timing

yeah 10m has been wild, i worked a ZL station on Tuesday afternoon just running 50 watts and a dipole that i threw up in a hurry like two years ago and never really optimized. thing just lit up. my logging software showed it as my first ZL on that band which was a nice surprise. honestly the solar flux has been climbing pretty steadily and the wwv numbers have been looking better than they were even six months ago so i think were in for a good stretch if the geomagnetic stuff stays quiet.

on the icom firmware thing — i did see something about that on one of the facebook groups but i cant find the original post now. someone said it was a minor update related to the spectrum scope display, not sure about the filter stuff. might be worth checking the icom japan site directly since the US site is sometimes behind on that stuff.

omg yes i caught part of that opening, im pretty new (got my general like 4 months ago) and i had no idea 10m could do that. my elmer told me it had been mostly dead for years so i never really bothered with it. tuned in and heard all this european stuff just pouring in and i didnt even know what to do at first lol. managed to make two contacts before i fumbled the exchange and kind of gave up but still, super cool to actually hear what a real opening sounds like vs just reading about it