We've been waiting and monitoring and finally it's happened in the last few days, the 6 m band has started to open up. As you know you've got to keep a very close eye on 6 m as sometimes signals can disappear as quickly as they appear. Some of the calls started coming in from Spain and Portugal at the weekend and then on Monday we had a very good sporadic E opening into Germany, Portugal, Spain and Poland, very strong stations, 59 both ways. The propagation didn't last for a long on Monday, however it was sure fun working 6 m for the first time using my ICOM 7800 and SteppIR with 6 m add-on. There were a few stations knocking around on Tuesday but it wasn't quite as good as Monday. The guy is using the bigger antennas, i.e. five and six element beams were able to hear a couple of stations outside of Europe, unfortunately the Steppir just wasn't able to hear the stations.
Some exciting news for me, I have just purchased a five element beam for the 6 m band. The guys are coming around on Wednesday evening to put it up, it will certainly be interesting to see the difference between this five element and the Steppir which only has three elements. Watch this space as I will be reporting on its progress.
