How to check propagation and activity on 6 m band?

How to check propagation and activity on 6 m band?

Magic band and sometimes the tragic band, that is what 6 m amateur radio band is known as! That is because you cannot predict signal paths on 6 m by your knowledge of greyline propagation, summer and winter long paths etc., as on HF. We never know when some paths will open and when some will not on 6 m. Signals may be weak and fading and openings may be short. That is because 6 meter being a VHF line of sight propagation frequency, if none of the special propagations liked Sporadic E, Transequatorial Propagation, Tropospheric scatter and Aurora scatter are available, the band can be quiet for months at a time. We can look at DX cluster information on various websites which give maps and lists for checking how the 6 m activity is at present, as on other bands. WSPR reports and 6 m beacons are another way to check the 50 MHz activity at any given time.

Live DX Cluster page from Radio Society of Great Britain gives option to know activity on all amateur radio bands from 160 m to VHF and above. There is an option to view 6 m activity on that page. Clicking on the link takes you to Dxlite page by G7VJR. The page gives recent activity which includes callsign of the station reporting, frequency on 6 m band being used, station worked, remarks which often mentions the mode, and time in UTC. I could see 50 reports spanning over a period of three hours. I could immediately recognize that most of the activity is on FT8, the popular digital mode available in WSJT-X. Reporting stations were from United States, Mexico, Chile, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan representing five continents.

One of the maps displaying live information on 6 m was at DX Maps. When I checked just now, there were activities in North America and Australia, but only very few stations. There is colour coding for the modes of propagation like Aurora, Sporadic E and Tropospheric scatter as discussed earlier. That site has option for selecting other amateur radio bands as well. Filters are there for continents, modes, callsigns, grid square and so on. As expected, activity was much more on the popular HF bands. There is provision for sending DX spots if you are logged in, with information like your callsign, locator, DX call and locator, short comment and propagation mode. Unfortunately, I could not see any 6 m activity from my region, possibily because it is a bit early for operators in this region to be active, on a cool morning in January. May be I should check at other times. Distance covered by the spots seen were also low. Propagation modes seen to be active by the colour codes were sporadic E and multi-hop sporadic E.