After a new qth move a few weeks back I have now put up a 2 ele quad for 6m and running a new hf/6m pa. Put several long calls out today on 6m 50150 in all directions on ssb. Not a single reply! I get more replies on 2m at present, and that's pretty quiet.


Has everyone migrated to other bands after the es season? or is everyone just using digi modes and never going on ssb?

Very sad state of affairs


Discuss...……………………


73

Steve gw0gei now in io72ve at 833 asl

Evening Steve

Its a mixture of the two..the main part of the Es season is pretty much over now and so lots of people (Me included) will/have been taking antennas down,additionally most of the DX activity this year was on FT8.

Thats not to say there was no ssb activity because there certainly was,but of course with no Sporadic E it declines pretty rapidly as the Es season ends.

Welcome back Steve, not seen you around for a good while.
This time of year I would hedge your bets on the contest evenings and Meteor Scatter in between times, although I am sure there are folk monitoring .150 SSB?
I have not been active for a while since I was ordered to remove my mast by the council, sold all my gear and now just building equipment instead - keeps me busy.

What equipment you running now Steve?

Cheers

Rob.

Consider yourself lucky as i’ve a 7 element quad and hear FA!

Steve I often call & listen on SSB but have never had a spontaneous QSO in the year that I have been on the band other than es or in a contest.

The choice here is to call/monitor 50.150 or 70.20 & I find 4m more productive.

When it comes to contests & activity periods I find the distances & activity pretty much the same between the two bands. I feel very pleased if I can manage 20 contacts, which I know most people's books is pathetic. But I live in a valley 150m asl & it gives me satisfaction to have any QSO.

Coming back into the hobby after 15+ years qrt, I invested in setups for 2 and 6m, only to discover that people pretty much only come onto the band's during contests, then disappear until the next one. Many are club stations.

I can always hear the Dutch and Belgian beacons on 2m, but the rest of the band is a desert.

2m is nothing like it was before I went qrt, when there was always ssb and cw activity.

I think the removal of the Morse test was the main contributor to the downturn in activity, as many of the Class B licences holders, migrated to the HF bands.

Another factor is that while there is a proliferation of 2m fm rigs, multimodes are a rareity, and the new generation of amateurs are only interested in buying 'off the shelf, plug and play radios', with building transverters, beyond the capability of many, or as an FL holders, not permitted.

Duplicate post.

It is sad the demise of the 2 meter, or 70 cms, or 23 cms stand alone multimodes, or even multiple band offerings of the aforementioned three.
However the fact most VHF and UHF radio's sold these day's are FM only, is to an extent offset by the number of "shack in a boxes" that cover VHF, or VHF/UHF, or even including 23 cms in some, along with their HF spectrum.
I don't think it's the "lack of radio's", to be honest, and of course there are still many "higher" band specific old second hand multimode varieties doing the rounds, it's more the fact it is so much more "hard work" to be reasonably successful at those frequencies, than it is on HF where many get their instant "DX" kicks with what amounts to bits of wire slung up.
Having a "captive audience", as in class B operators restricted to the higher bands, certainly helped, where folks who didn't want to take the morse, or felt they were not capable, simply had to make the best of what they had available.
These day's where most of the spectrum is on offer from day one, many see it as so much more instant results satisfying, to simply go straight to HF.

You could say, more radio operators, than radio amateurs around now

It's been heading that way for quite a few years sadly, and one day in the not too distant future, it may well end up ALL radio operators, with all gear simply plug and play off the shelf!
Any "experimentation", will amount to just buying "something else" as an experiment comparison!
Building from scratch takes lot's of time, effort, more effort, and more time!
Many these day's "fit" amateur radio into an already overloaded lifestyle, so want whatever "time" they chuck at it to give instant justification for even bothering results.
Home brew almost always puts "instant results" on the back burner, but trying to explain to some these day's that "the building phase" can be even more fun than operating the device itself, once the "project" is finished, often falls on deaf ears!

The Icom 9700 will be a game changer for the black box operators and might see more operators return to the higher bands.

That being said there is no end of transverter equipment on the market from budget through to professional grade, I think the main issue is laziness - in order to be successful on VHF you need more than just a Moonraker white stick stuck on the side of the gable-end, however a simple dipole, halo or even a three element yagi is no real hardship and can be built for much less than the cost of a white stick vertical.
You don't "need" a £500 rotator or £800 tennamast, you can get away with a £20 DJ speaker stand from Ebay and homebrew beam, turned by hand of course, for less than £100.

Still yet to see a valid excuse for not getting on SSB and working the DX.

6M has always been an all or nothing sort of band.
When it's open HFers migrate up, and VHFers, down to the band.
Once the band closes they return home.

Outside what is perceived as the ES season many remove their antennas.
I say perceived as I've had good 6M QSOs in the winter.

4M is more productive. Partly, I suspect, because there are still challenges involving new countries and squares whereas, on 6M, many of us have certainly worked the majority of available European squares.
Around here, on 4M, there's almost always a couple of FM stations on the monitor station display, plus the odd MS and SSB.
6M, on the other hand, can be dead. Except for FT8 of course.

As regards general usage of VHF/UHF, ignoring the internet linked, repeaters FM end of the band which always seems to have something going on - often the same QSO on multiple frequencies!! - the only real day to day activity is 2M SSB and MS.
The licencing is, I suspect, partly to blame but there's also the fact that stations are spread more thinly across the bands.

Prior to 1968 class B licence holders didn't have 2M so 70cm tended to be where the activity was.
When 2M was added a lot of us went to 2M because there were many class A licence holders on that band.

These days there has been an increase in activity on 23cm, and 10GHz, resulting in people migrating away from 2M.

The whole thing is a constantly changing scene.
2M used to be the band of choice for setting up contacts on 10GHz etc but, as was pointed out in Radcom letters last month, it's often impossible to work some of the 10GHz paths on 2M. Hence the extensive use of KST and the recent look at "network radios".

Steve - GW0GEI - I heard you on 4M on Thursday but it wasn't your freq and couldn't attracted your attention

Cheers

Tony

If I hear the comment "I don't need to know how it works as long as pressing the button means I can speak to someone" one more time I swear I'll scream!
How the hell did they get into the hobby.

When I was first licenced I had to build the equipment before I could operate my own station.
With everything else going on it probably took a year or two.

Lately the construction has slowed down somewhat but for decades it was the main reason for having a licence.

Cheers

Tony

Same for me Tony, if I could possibly disect the time spent within the hobby into time on air versus time on the bench "tinkering", I know which would be the greater!
Don't get me wrong I was into operating, far more than I am now years ago, but I was always much more into repairing, restoring, modifying, and building from scratch many bit's of kit to be honest!
It was never the thought of "DX" got me into radio, it was the technicalities of how and why it worked, from a very early age when I built my first Xtal set!
Helped by the fact my earliest mentor, and donator of MANY "parts" an old G2+2, had a shack that was literally entirely consisted of either full homebrew, or for some items, modified ex war department equipment, and often when I visited him had the soldering iron in his hand far more than the key or mic!

That's an easy one to answer Tony.

From CB, and into amateur radio via the FL. At which level many remained.

As I have said before, they will never become radio amateurs because they lack the intelligence, and I will never consider them as fellow radio amateurs.