so i know we're heading toward solar max and ive been watching the flux numbers but i wasnt really prepared for what happened last weekend. fired up the radio saturday morning just to check in on a local net and ended up spending like four hours working stations in europe and south america on 10m with my little dipole in the attic. like the band just opened up out of nowhere around 10am local time and didnt really close until late afternoon.

also been seeing a lot of chatter about the new icom ic-905 stuff and whether anyone has actually gotten their hands on one yet, seems like availability is still kind of spotty depending on where you are. and did anyone catch the announcement about the wspr network updates they posted on the ARRL site last week? curious if that changes anything for those of us who leave a pi running overnight for propagation monitoring.

anyway mostly just wanted to share the 10m thing because it made my whole weekend and i feel like a lot of newer folks might not realize how good the band can get right now if you haven't really tried it recently

yeah 10m has been something else this cycle, i remember back around 2013ish when it was decent but this feels different, like more sustained openings rather than just random spikes. i worked a ZL on 10m ssb last thursday with maybe 50 watts into a vertical and he was genuinely 59 both ways. thats not something you get to say very often from the midwest.

on the ic-905 thing, my buddy at the local club actually got one a few months back and his take was basically that its impressive hardware but the software side still needs some work, there were firmware quirks he had to deal with. hes happy with it overall but said dont rush out and pay over msrp for one. the 2.4ghz stuff is genuinely cool if you have line of sight paths to play with though.

wait so 10 meters works like that? im still pretty new (got my general like 8 months ago) and i honestly havent even tried it yet because someone at my club said it was dead. guess i need to just get up there and see for myself. what time of day do you usually find it open, is it mostly mornings or does it vary a lot?