In the course of the most ham radio operators career on the air they will find that they spend a lot of their time on the 20 meter band. This is because 20 meters is a very good band for propagation and is almost always open to communications. The problem with a band that is open like 20 meters is that every amateur radio operator that has a HF radio is on 20 m, well at least it seems like that is what is happening…
Another thing about me is that, I really am not into contesting either. This means that the 20 meter band is not available to me on the weekends as there is pretty much a contest every weekend…and for good reason! Contesting is a very popular activity in amateur radio around the world. Although for me, I just am not super into it.
The WARC bands do not get used in contesting so on the weekends I find myself dialing around 17 and 30 meters alot.
The N6ARA Tiny Paddle has really started to grow on me, I like the size and how well is just plain works. it is effortless to send good code with this key. I can highly recommend these is you want a small light weight key for things like SOTA and POTA.
Another thing I like about the WARC (World Amateur Radio Conference) bands is that the 30 meter band is reserved for data modes only. Did I mention my favorite mode is CW and wouldn’t you know it, the powers that be consider morse code a data mode… So I can goto the low end of 30 meters and almost always find someone to chat with. That is something to remember too, the WARC bands are pretty narrow and many modes share them, so sticking to the gentleman’s agreement on where your mode normally operates will go a long way towards being efficient with these small band allocations and making sure we all have room for our modes.
The rig setup is really a lot simpler than this photo makes it look. I wanted to get an overview photo of the whole thing for once to show the relationship of the parts. This rig would look like this if it were on 80 meters or 12 though so this photo isn’t strictly about the WARC bands…
A lot of people do not use the WARC bands very much as they are not the conventional ham bands. I tend to enjoy using these bands as they are normally quieter and less crowded than the conventional bands. Another benefit is that the POTA program also uses these bands as it is not a contest oriented program other than award chasing like any other awards system (Think ARRL W.A.S. or something similar).
On the day that I decided to activate on the 12 meter band I was looking to confirm that it was open to communication and decided to check the 10 meter band to see if it was open. I did this because I couldn’t hear any stations other than someone operating FT8 and had no idea how far away they were. This is a common practice as normally if a higher band has propagation, then the lower one will as well. I found that the 10 meter band had beacons coming into my location in the state of Georgia from California with clear audio and this gave me the confidence I needed to try and activate a park on the 12 m band.
As you can see from the logbook I did get a successful activation on 12 m and it was a lot of fun. There were periods when I did not get a call back from my CQs but, for the most part, they came in fairly steady for the whole time I pursued the activation. This just goes to show that you can get an activation on something other than 20 m if you want to and it also gets the radio warm doing something other than the usual.
Get out there and get on the air.
73
David
WK4DS