At the moment, 10m is again in great shape. Most days DX from across the world may be copied. Come May, June, July and August we see the peak Es season in the northern hemisphere which will allow DX up to about 1500km almost daily and some times further. F2 is currently very good. 10m is usually best for DX in the sunlight hours.
There even some single band multi mode 10m rigs available. These are based on CB radios, but can be very good as 10m radios.
There is little doubt that 10m (28MHz) is my favourite band of all. In the past I have used these with CB verticals very successfully on 10m.
See https://sites.google.com/view/g3xbm4/home/hf-mf-and-lf/10m-operation .
A reminder than OFCOM usually updates the data it holds on licences weekly. It has also published several documents this week. See the OFCOM website for details.
At 0955z my 8m FT8 was turned on. I am not really expecting any spots. Currently, no spots!
UPDATE 1455z: No spots.
I wanted a simple way of getting on this MF band and this was the result. Several have since been successfully built.
It produces about 10W into 50 ohms, but the ERP will be considerably lower depending on the antenna used. In my case, my "antenna" was just an earth-electrode "antenna" in the ground with the electrodes about 12m apart with the wire back to the shack along the fence not very high. I tried the wire on the ground and it made little difference. My theory is this forms a loop in the ground. The actual loop diameter will get larger as frequency is reduced. Such an antenna has been used for far field amateur TX tests (successfully) at well below 10 kHz.
Most nights my measured 10mW ERP was spotted in Norway on WSPR. It used the FT817ND in split mode TXing on 80m but receiving directly on 630m.
See https://sites.google.com/view/g3xbm4/home/hf-mf-and-lf/homebrew/630m-472khz-transverter .
