6M FM is back in town

This morning I was playing with 10M, which required the "ham-stick" to be set up on the balcony. Having no luck with that effort, I replaced the 10M ham-stick with the 6M version. For whatever reason, six meter SSB and CW blasts through the electronics in my (and most likely others') place. FM is okay, though, so I thought that I could give the St. Paul 53.470 machine a try and see if it was out of testing yet.

Well, the 53.470 repeater didn't respond. On a whim, I tried the Burnsville 53.370 FM repeater that's been down since September or so. TCRC's website still shows it as out of service, but it's not updated regularly.

As it turned out, the 53.370- (PL 100.0) is working again. The controller now has a voice ID, which is getting more common around here. I "ker-chunk"ed it with 5W, though I couldn't hear my voice on my scanner. Maybe I'm not getting in to the machine very well, but it took about 15W to open up the machine before it went down.

I've never heard anyone on the 53.370 machine, so this isn't particularly exciting news for most people. Burnsville is pretty far to the south-east for good metro area coverage, so the machine will probably languish for a long time -- especially considering that the club's website is telling its members that it doesn't work.

Six meters in general seems to be hyped-up and disappointing. Even with the solar cycle somewhat favourable, the band is abandoned for weak signal. I've never heard any of the Pacific FM DX that numerous hams have told tales about. It's just empty and noisy, and not at all "magic". At least with 1.25M, people know that there's almost no activity. Six meters has been blown up out of proportion by a few advocates in what seems to be a desperate effort to create activity out of nothing by bluff and BS.

That said, I'm hoping someone gets on our restored 6M repeater. It would be nice to get an idea of the range that the band offers on FM.

UPDATE: As Pete pointed out, TCRC has updated their site to reflect the on-air status of the WOBU 6M machine. I've also updated RepeaterBook for them.