On 10/10 day

October 10th, which is 10/10 both for the way Americans and the rest of the world write the date, could well mean more to hams than to "regular" people. Some of you are nodding in agreement already. 

Quick explanation, among ham radio's relatively strange habits is to refer to the wavelengths of various frequencies we're allocated by their metric lengths. The High Frequency spectrum is spread across the 3.0  to 30MHz frequency range, but there are more allocations above and below the HF band. Now, I don't personally have any radios that read out in wavelengths in metric or US numbers but that could be done. It just isn't done routinely. 

The general allocation of HF bands for hams in the US, given in meters is 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 meters. It's not universally true that the bands we use contain any frequency for those wave lengths. Most of the time it's just "close enough" for someone naming it. When I was first licensed, in 1976, the bands labelled 60, 30, 17, and 12 meters weren't available to hams, it was just 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters. 

For working far away stations, the higher frequency bands tend to propagate over longer distances due to using the higher F2 layer of the ionosphere. That means that when conditions are good, you'll hear places on 10 meters that are farther than you'll hear on lower frequencies. The other side of that is that more people will tune their rigs to 10m than when conditions aren't as good - also called "when the band isn't open." 

So some time ago - I really haven't found a summary of that today - a group of guys who wanted to try to encourage more use of 10 meters got together and started a club called 10-10 International and one of their "tricks" to get more people on 10 was to issue "Ten Ten numbers" which fed into contests and other activities on the air in which transmitting a receiving each other's 10-10 numbers was the way scores were determined. I got my 10-10 number early in my "ham life", July of '77.

Since today was 10/10 (until 7:59:59 PM in EDT), I thought it would be a good time to get on 10m and see if there was any activity going on where stations were swapping numbers. Bottom line: nope. In close to an hour tuning around the SSB portion and FT8 channel I heard and saw (read? "copied?") nobody giving a 10-10 number. In fact, I heard one other person and he was calling CQ from California.

Today's Planetary K index (K_P). The three tallest bars on the right include my time listening in. (Source, but you won't get this one, you'll get the one closest to the UTC time that you click on the link.) Was the dead band due to the Geomagnetic storm (G2 in the orange)? Could be.