so ive been spending a lot of time on 10 meters the past few weeks and honestly i forgot how fun this band could be. worked a bunch of South American stations last Tuesday with just 50 watts and my old dipole, signals were genuinely S9 on some of them. feels like we're really cooking now with the solar cycle picking up steam.

also saw something on one of the email lists about Icom supposedly announcing a new HF rig but i cant find much solid info on it. anybody heard anything more specific? i saw a blurry photo floating around that might have been from some trade show but who knows if thats even real. not in any rush to upgrade but always curious whats coming down the pipe.

on a totally different note, our local club is doing a special event station next month for the county fair, if anyone in the midwest is on 40m around that time keep an ear out for us. should be a good time even if the logging always turns into a bit of a circus with 6 people crowded around one laptop.

yeah 10m has been absolutely wild, i worked Japan twice last week on SSB from my back porch which i honestly did not expect at all. my antenna situation is pretty mediocre right now — just a vertcal with no radials to speak of — and it still pulled through. solar flux has been sitting up pretty high lately so hopefully this keeps going through the summer at least.

on the Icom thing, i think what you saw might be related to the IC-7760 rumors that have been going around. somebody on one of the DX clusters was talking about it having a remote head design similar to the 705 but for full power HF operation. take that with a grain of salt though, ive been burned before by forum speculation turning into nothing. remember how long those FT-710 rumors dragged on before that thing actually shipped.

oh man i just got my general like two months ago and i havent tried 10m yet, mostly been hanging out on 40m because thats where my elmers told me to start. maybe i should give it a shot this weekend. whats a good freq to just listen around on first? i dont want to accidentally jump into a net or something embarrassing like that.