so i dont know if anyone else has been noticing but 6 meters has been absolutely wild the past couple weeks. im talking coast to coast contacts on FT8 with signals i wouldnt normally dream of working, had a guy in Arizona calling me from here in upstate NY and it was like he was next door. Es season seems early this year or maybe im just paying more attention now that ive actually got a decent antenna up finally.

anyway while i was down the rabbit hole reading about propagation i stumbled across some chatter about Icom supposedly announcing something new in the IC-705 line or maybe a successor, couldnt find anything super concrete but there were a few posts on some japanese ham forums that got translated and it sounded legit. anybody seen anything more solid on that? i know icom has been hinting at stuff at hamvention but i havent been in a couple years so im kind of out of the loop on what was shown this year if anything.

also if youre not already watching the dxmaps and pskreporter this time of year you're really missing out, the band opening visualization stuff is just so much better than it used to be.

yeah the 6m opening last tuesday was the best ive seen in a couple years honestly. i worked like 14 states in under an hour just sitting there watching the waterfall light up. my neighbor who just got his ticket last fall couldnt believe it, he was asking me if it was always like this and i had to explain that no, this is kind of special and he should appreciate it haha.

as for the icom thing, i saw some of those same translated posts and honestly who knows. they do tend to drip feed info before major announcements. i wouldnt hold my breath til theres an official press release but the rumor mill is fun i guess. hamvention coverage this year was kinda scattered from what i saw online, didnt seem like any huge bombshells dropped but a few vendors were showing some updated firmware stuff and one of the smaller SDR companies had something interesting in the fleamarket area from what a buddy told me.

wait so is 6 meters like always good during summer or is this actually unusual? im a tech class right now studying for general and honestly didnt even realize 6m was a thing people got excited about. i thought VHF was mostly just local repeater stuff. now im kind of wishing i had gotten into this sooner before the opening ends or whatever.