Now that Yaesu has their VX-8R ham radio due to hit shelves, its predecessor, the VX-7R, is being discounted, and fast. It’s $285 at Universal Radio, and $275 at HRO. I’m a big fan of my tiny little VX-2R (and VX-1R!), but the VX-7R (and the VX-8R that’s replacing it) is a “full-power” HT, putting out 5 Watts. It covers 6, 2, and 440. The VX-7R also does 300 mW on 220 MHz, which isn’t much power at all (0.3 Watts), but it’s better than nothing.

I’ve had a passing interest in 6 Meter FM for a bit now. There’s the 53.07 MHz machine on Uncanoonuc, the big hill in Goffstown that’s home to all sorts of transmitter sites. (Indeed, so many that the noise floor forced them to move their receiver to another site.) 6 Meters can feature some tremendous range, and that’s before skip factors in. (It’s sometimes called the magic band because of its status in between HF and VHF.) Further north, there’s now the 53.77 MHz machine on Gunstock… And the NE Repeaters site lists a whole bunch more. Sadly, the one on Mount Washington appears to be off the air.

(Besides the fact that I don’t own a 6 meter radio and have no experience setting up repeaters, I have a certain urge to try to set up a 6 meter machine on Mount Washington. It’s problematic, though, because the duplexers needed to use the same antenna for simultaneous transmit and receive are enormous and not many were ever made… The same problem exists with antennas, so something like a DB420 folded-dipole array would be entirely unreasonable… They do make some verticals, though the linked one is the only monoband 6 meter vertical. (And, as a 2-5/8-wave vertical for ~53 MHz, it’s 21 feet tall.) The radios are the easy part, as the 42-50 MHz band used to be popular with public safety, back when all the mobile radios put out 100+ Watts and were build really solid. I’ve read of older radios (Mastr-IIs or Micors, for example) being brought into the 6 meter band with superb performance, and ~150 Watts out. I’d be very curious about how a 150 Watt repeater on 6 meters, with an antenna providing 6 dB gain, would perform on the summit of Mount Washington.

But first things first… I don’t have a radio that does 6 meters. 😉