Jonathan,I really would not worry about Challenges as an activator or a chaser. Just get on with what you do/like and see what happens; whatever mode of propagation. The inheritance of the 12M Challenge is that even though it is over people are more inclined to visit that band as an activator which is not a bad thing I think. The same may happen for the current Challenge.
Night night
Mike
When the season starts how about a wire version of one of these up the usual pole: 6m 5/8 vertical antenna
I’ve no intention of hauling beams Andy. Beams are for when I go contesting, when LDF-450 as a minimum is the feeder of choice and kV and tetrodes are the finals to use 
I intend to use simple wire antennas on both 6m and 10m for this challenge.
The problem we have Jonathon, is apart from getting someone to seed the ionosphere with chaff, we can’t order up another sunspot maximum and so we have to make do with what we are likely to get. By aligning with the SpE seasons, there should be plenty of openings for at least single hop SpE on 6m and 10m. That alone should make things interesting and any multi-hop or F2 will only add to the fun.
No I haven’t hence why I thought I might try it. I am just reading what a few sources seem to suggest, hence the “would have thought”
So even in the early Winter months there was no noticeable difference in ionospheric improvements to 6m ?
I have had no interest in anything above 21MHz prior to SOTA, that was due my parents house being in a valley. I always tended to gain more interest in building rather then operating.
I just feel I am in a position with radio now where Its becoming too monotonous in the sense of working the same modes all the time and fighting off QRM on 40m SSB. I am not saying I want to be disloyal to all the brilliant people who chase on there, but it would be nice to offset it with something like 6m that offers a different kind of satisfaction, which is not so variable. I am nearly confident enough to start using CW, maybe that will do the trick.
Maybe I should just have another beer 
Jonathan.
I’ve just finished constructing a 6M SOTABeam, which is a Moxon 2 element, so I hope to take part in the 6M activity, work and family commitments permitting.
Auroral and meteor scatter are also useful modes on 6M. It’s a shame so many European TV stations have closed down as they made great high power beacons for detecting MS and F2 or even Es propagation.
Auroral Es gets my vote on 6m, having worked VE5 & VE6 from here on that mode. (Phone of course, none of your easy cw rubbish)
I wonder how the picture’s changed in the last five years. I know how my SOTA activity has changed, but that’s mostly down to me. The general view would presumably reflect things like band conditions as well as changes in preferences, development of new data modes, challenges, and so on…
Hi Rick
I’m sure CW still winning again and data will grooving 
73 Éric
Ask the database:
| CW : | 2661220 |
|---|---|
| SSB : | 2176819 |
| FM : | 1069953 |
| Data : | 23475 |
| AM : | 1653 |
| Other : | 1595 |
| DV : | 1417 |
| 7MHZ : | 2302985 |
|---|---|
| 14MHZ : | 1420666 |
| 144MHZ : | 1094962 |
| 10MHZ : | 492588 |
| 5MHZ : | 116766 |
| 433MHZ : | 108027 |
| 18MHZ : | 89591 |
| 3.5MHZ : | 69471 |
| 24MHZ : | 66000 |
| 21MHZ : | 55485 |
I started reading this thread from the very first post and I after seeing those charts I was going to post my coments, but I saw there were not too many posts, so I decided that I would read them all before I post. When I reached the very last post, I realised of this:
my goodness!
The thread started in 2015 and this means I very likely read it at that time, but now I don’t remember having done such.
As Rick @M0LEP wrote in his post, I also wonder how the picture is now.
Regarding 2015’s picture, I wanted to say that having nearly half of the QSOs on CW…
…and being 30m a CW only band with great performance for intercontinental contacts and even great DX at times, I wonder why 30m seems to be so far less preferred compared to 40 and 20m.
I guess the picture today will not be much different today regarding 30m with respect to 40m/20m.
I often find activators really hard or sometimes impossible to copy on 40 AND 20m, but they are an easy copy on 30m. This is obviously the way I see things from my location in Northern Spain and a HB9 or OE station will probably see things differently from their location pretty much in the centre of Europe. However, I’d like to encourage all CW activators to always give 30m a go during each activation.
Best 73,
Guru
I think the reason is that no phone operation takes place, the pie chart is for all modes. If the pie chart was to be drawn based only on CW contacts (rather than activations that use phone as well as CW) then the 30m segment would be significantly larger.
Here are the pie charts for these data:
Good point, Brian, I agree and I have baked a new pie based on the by-mode-activity, where I estimated 45% of the QSOs made on each band were CW for all bands except 30m, being 100% and 2m and 70cm, where I estimated only 2% of the QSOs being CW. This is the new chart based on that estimation:
As you guessed, 30m share gets larger, although still half of 40m and below 20m.
73,
Guru
I’ve been idle part of the day, and ended up with a couple of charts that show how my own chasing has changed year by year. It looks like this (displayed normalised as percentages because some years were much busier than others):
I’d need to do much more digging to produce something similar for my activations.
FYI you can generate your own activation charts here:
Select “Stats Charts”
and get various charts like:
73 Joe
SOTLAS shows up-to-date statistics for any call, not only yours. Enter the callsign, then hit the “More stats” button below the “Activations per year” chart. Great job by Manuel HB9DQM.
73, Markus HB9BRJ
Thanks for the pointer. That sent me down a rabbit-hole of idle reminiscence for a while… I’ve resisted the temptation to add all my photos…
