Chasing Unicorns.

The 6m band is something of a unicorn to me. I've chased it around, never been able to really hear anything on it - namely a local net bouncing off a repeater 100km away and have always seen it as some kind of mystical beast. 

Last night the local 6m net was on, and I heard it. I figured that was a possibility - the new vertical doing 6m and all. Then I realised that I wasn't actually using vertical. I was still on the dipole. 

OK then. I flicked over to the vertical. Still there. Everyone complaining the band is a bit noisy. 

So.. I was hearing 6m via an antenna that the only non-static noise I've ever heard on the entire band was one person once on the repeater's TX frequency - and they sounded like they were on the moon. 

I guess I found my unicorn. Now I'm going to need to find it each week just to make sure that I'm not just hallucinating.

The reception was pretty good on both antennas. The vertical was a fraction noisier than the dipole. I had the DSP on the IC706 wound up quite a bit. It's old, but it works. I can't help but think that a modern radio would be quite a bit more capable of reducing the noise but cleaning up the voice. 

In less exciting news, the cable for the IC208H arrived yesterday - complete with a set of adaptors for different radios. If you get the adaptor cables around the right way, it seems to work - fun without manuals and all. I was able to download the base radio configuration into CHIRP, suck a heap of repeaters down from RepeaterBook via CHIRP - selecting the ones I wanted and pulled them into the configuration. A bit of a tidy up to pull out the massive pile of blank channels it left in the middle and I wound up with a usable configuration I was able to upload back to the radio. 

The only real annoyance is that I'm using the 20220118 build of CHIRP and the split option is missing. I don't really need it beyond NA1SS, but still. Annoying.