The AM Forum

At one point we had about 12 people in a round table on 7290 last Sunday.
Just as I remember from many years ago, people checking in, and out, and some coming back in hours later, almost all had good signal levels into South Jersey.

2 or 3 home brew rigs, a G76, a valiant, a Viking 2, a globe king 400, a Kenwood something, a DX60 or two a dx100 from memory, and an HT37, plus an Eico 720/730.

Quite a mess but a lot of fun.
Most were good and kept it short but a few people felt the pull of the low power old buzzard tx...

Good to hear, Brett. I like 40m a lot, it's a really fun band and can be a lot of fun at night, too.

Of course, you do need to pay closer attention to how long you ramble on. 40 can be fickle. On a few occasions I've waited as one person or another basically talked the rest of us out of band conditions by going on for 10 minutes or more.

40M is an odd band about that. When we get on 7160 around noon it always seems to be fading slowly until at 4PM it seems about gone. What are the best hours for it?

Best for what? It's good for contacts out to 300-500 miles during the day and 1000s of miles at night. There can be a lull in the propagation around noon.

Most often, 40 is good from 8 am till about 2 pm when broadcast stations pop in and out.
At my location, sometimes the band is just dull all day, but its often good all day, and sometimes everyone in the Eastern half of the US booms in strong even if running 25 watts.
Last Sunday was one of those days here, only one station was a hard copy at times at my location.

40 meters-is my favorite band - ran qrp for years there - cw and am - hundreds of qsos - day and night - being next to the ocean might help - {ya think?} greg-n1exi

Hey Greg, Get on 10 meter AM even if you have a coat hanger. There are a few people right in your area on there.

Seems to be some nice activity at nite lately.
Broadcast seems to come and go a lot.

40m open this evening, lots of SSB activity, but no AM heard by me except the broadcasters :(

Some kind of weird jamming going on (some government trying to stop reception of the broadcast?) very rough broadband noise, seemingly tens of KHz wide and lasting for about 10-20 seconds at a time, also around 7300.