so ive been checking into the 75m sunday night traffic net pretty regularly for the past few months now and honestly it's become kind of a ritual for me. grab a coffee, fire up the rig around 7pm local, and just listen for a bit before checking in. some weeks i pass traffic, some weeks i just check in and say 73 and thats it. but theres something weirdly satisfying about it even when nothing exciting happens.

anyway i was curious if anyone here does regular net check-ins and which ones you follow. im also wondering about special event stations - ive heard a couple on the air lately and grabbed a few contacts but i dont really know how to find out about them ahead of time. like is there a calendar somewhere or do you just stumble across them on the spotting clusters. would be nice to actually plan for one instead of just catching it by accident.

yeah the W1AW schedule and the ARRL special event stations page is probably your best bet for planning ahead. they post them a week or two out usually. also the club that runs our local 2m net actually emails out a monthly list of special events happening in our region which is handy. for 75m i bounce between a couple nets depending on the night - the old timers on some of those nets have been doing it for decades and you can tell, theres a real rhythm to how they run things. sunday nights are good because propagation on 40 and 75 tends to cooperate a bit better at least here in the midwest. if you havent tried any of the NTSN traffic nets thats worth poking around too, some nights are slow but when theres actual formal traffic moving its kind of cool to be part of that chain even in a small way.

I just started doing this actually - only been licensed since last spring and a guy in my club told me to try checking into the local 2m net on wednesday nights just to get comfortable talking on the radio. felt super awkward the first couple times but now its fine lol. didnt know there was stuff on 75m too, might have to look into that once i get an HF rig sorted out. what kind of antenna are you running for that band if you dont mind me asking