I had a pileup of heterodyne signals coming in that day and most of the signals were low, at the noise level or so. The other problem is many peoples modulation was too low and not enough to be heard at or over the noise level. If they ran a D104 or such then we would have been in business but I heard nothing but low level style modulation with no punch whatsoever. Mostly everyone was on a Icom/Kenwood/Yaesu radio however I did hear a Sr46 but it sounded pretty bland on the air, probably using stock mic. I was told by others that I was heard loud and clear but I could not hear everyone coming back to me as they were all jumbled up together.
Keep listening and patience is key! It seems this year might be a good year for 6M AM, as previous years were terrible on this end. I work the SSB freqs as well and bring people up and over to finish the QSO over and out on 50.4 AM to see how that propagates.
Obviously, that's the problem when everyone tries to operate on one frequency. I very rarely, when the band is open, call CQ on 50.4. I generally move up or down 10, 20, or 30 KHz either side of 50.4 and sometimes even more. I've even caught some good AM QSO's on or around 50.2. Everyone sitting and operating on 50.4 generally become counterproductive when the band is open.
