VHF Activity

I read somewhere online yesterday (sorry, didn't make a note of the link as I didn't plan posting on the topic at the time) a forum comment from a guy who was selling his SSB 2m rig because “there was no activity in my area”. Like many of us he'd started his amateur career with an FM hand held, and acquired an SSB rig to give the mode a try, but didn't bother to put up a horizontally polarised antenna because he didn't want to incur a lot of extra trouble before deciding if he liked this mode. To be blunt this casual approach is likely to result in the disillusionment he ended up experiencing.

 Back in the 1980's as a G7 class B licensee and limited to operation on 2m and above, I remember the same comments concerning activity on 2m were common amongst the amateur community in my area, but due to my license restrictions I was forced to persevere on this band. My attitude then was similar to that of the mystery poster above which resulted in growing boredom with the hobby and a rapid move to G0 status to get away from VHF/UHF as quickly as possible. This was a big mistake.

 Flash forwards thirty years, now older and hopefully a little wiser, and after a twenty year absence from the hobby, I've returned to discover a much better situation on 2m than the one I remember from my early days. Activity nights are currently held via the Amateur Radio VHF and UHF Group on Yahoo groups (link), and the band in my area is very busy on the evening of the first Tuesday of every month thanks to the RSGB UKAC contest (link). Local activity at other times is also not too bad, even up here in relatively quiet N. Lincolnshire, I've built up a list of thirty or so local contacts on 2m after only a few months of operation. Many of these stations are regular operators too, so there is usually someone around to have a chat with most days.

I sympathise with our poor disillusioned friend mentioned at the start of this post. We are all prone to making his errors including myself. I remember in March at my local club meeting saying to someone that conditions on HF had been awful since Christmas, only to discover the next day on reading the HF reports in Radcom that other G stations had been finding good openings on the bands and working lots of DX. At least I now know that the answer is not to sell my rig in frustration, but to work a little harder and to be a bit more clever at tracking DX down.