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 Over
the years I keep coming back to this band. First operations were
back in 1980 with what was then a popular way to get onto this band
an Army surplus C42 low band VHF radios. The contacts around
metropolitan Melbourne were a lot fun and the C42 was a great radio
to tinker with as it was close to indestructible.
The photo right is
the C42 transceiver and its essential inverter power supply. The
frequency coverage of the C42 radio is from 36 to 60 MHz suited to
50 kHz channel-spacing. An internal crystal calibrator and a centre
tuning meter enable the frequency to be set accurately, but
the radios were notorious for frequency drift over time. I guess two
C42s in contact would happily drift across the band together! The RF
power output was about 10 watts, but I believe substantially more
power was possible.
After
purchasing a second hand Yaesu FT736R in 2000 which had a 6 metre
band module I started exploring this band again with both FM and SSB.
I was constantly amazed during the summer months of the highly
stable interstate contacts I could achieve with a modest 10 Watts on
either FM or SSB. This was of course the normal sporadic ‘E’
propagation that occurs at this time of the year. The 6 metre band
is unfortunately a band that has never attracted large numbers of
operator, so you could easily imagine how many opening go un-noticed
and un-worked.
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