Testing 6 Meters

I’ve been doing some testing on 6 meters as a possible beyond LOS comms for the Guerrilla fighter. On the days I have been testing the band shows as closed. I setup my home station to send a HB on JS8CALL every 10 minutes. I plug my XIEGU X6100 into my magnet mount antenna that is actually a 2/6 meter antenna. Then as I head to my location I can listen for the home station to send the HB.

The home location has a 6 meter antenna on a 20ft pole with the radio running 30 watts. The radio at the home station is an Icom 706MKII.

So the most recent test I did was while I was out cutting firewood. As the crow flies I was about 30 miles away but the drive to get up there was much further. It took about an hour and a half. So while I was in the low lands and canyons I could still here the home station sending a HB. I was actually quite surprised.

Once I got up on the Mt I tried making contact with the roof mount antenna. I did make contact once but then couldn’t get a reply from the home station again. The home station was coming in strong thou.

I setup a jungle antenna and sent a HB. The home station replied. I asked the station to give me and SNR? and I got that reply also. I sent a message to the home station that I was in location 1 and got its ACKNOWLEDGE response. Mission accomplished.

The video below was my start of testing 6 meters. I was 20 miles from the home station. I also was messing with some different antennas. I had interesting results.

I think the biggest problem with 6 meters is the lack of portable radios that do SSB. I know there are some but the selection is small. Also the lack of HT’s make it a bit of a problem.

As I pointed out in my post about HawkEye 360 is doesn’t monitor down to 50 MHZ so that is just another reason to put 6 meter radios into your comms plan.

Below is most the gear I was using for this testing. The PowerFilm solar panel is not the same. PowerFilm was making a 13 watt panel for Amazon a few years ago and thats the one I’m using. They don’t offer it anymore.