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This comment is a common misconception, that 6 and 10 are near useless without SSB.
It is true that the largest section of 10 meters, by bandwidth, is not FM, however the 29500 to 29700 kHz range is very active with FM, both repeaters and simplex. I have pretty regularly hit the NY repeater from my mobile in California, and I have talked to Japan from the mobile on FM 10 meters.
However the largest section of 6 meters is Band Planned for FM operation, not SSB. Yes, of course, you can operate SSB anywhere in 6 meters except the 50.0 to 50.1 MHz segment. This is like 2 meters, in that a small segment of the band is set aside for CW and the rest can be used for voice, be it SSB, AM, or FM. But from 50.8 MHz up to 54.0 MHz the majority of the band is Band Planned for FM operations. By far most of 6 meters is not SSB, but rather Band Planned for FM.
I have to say, here locally I use 6 and 10 M FM more than I use 70 cm.
As for antennas, I have used the Comet UHV-4 antenna with the Yaesu FT8900R for a several years now in one vehicle. The antenna works reasonably well (I am not a fan of multiband antennas in general). This antenna covers everything the 8900R covers, with one feedline. It is tall, but not any taller than any other decent 10 meter antenna, and shorter than most. It does not bend at speed any more than any other antenna of its height, and has one small extra element on it near the top, hardly a porcupine. The Diamond CR-8900A has nothing extra on it at all and certainly could not be called a porcupine by any stretch of the imagination.
However I have also run mono band (and dual band) antennas with the FT8900R in another vehicle. My favorite setup was a mono band 10 meter antenna (cut down 102" CB whip), a mono band base loaded 5/8 wave 6 meter antenna, and a dual band 2/70 antenna. The rig has a single UHF connector for antenna, you come out of the rig to a diplexer something like the MX62M. This yields two ports, one covering 1.6 to 56 MHz, and the other covering 76 to 470 MHz. Put your favorite 2/70 dual band antenna on the 76 - 470 port. The 1.6 to 56 MHz port then goes to another diplexer, say something like the Diamond MX610. This splits it to two ports, one from 1.3 to 30 MHz, the other from 49 to 470 MHz. The 1.3 to 30 MHz port goes to your favorite 10 meter antenna, and the 49 to 470 MHz port to your favorite 6 meter antenna. Total in-band insertion loss (I measured it for my installation) for each antenna path was less than 1 dB. The performance of this setup was on par with what I expected from the antennas, in general very good with no operational or performance issue that I could determine were related to the installation. However, the vehicle did indeed look like a porcupine, in fact that was what a few people nicknamed it, the 3 antennas associated with the FT8900R plus 3 others for other bands were hard to ignore.
Could the FT8900R and its clones be better with the addition of SSB? Of course, if done right. However there is no negative to having FM coverage in these bands. Both bands are usable with FM, and most 6 meter traffic is probably FM anyway. When you look at the feature set of the radios, such as dual receive and crossband capability, the selection of a quad band vs a dual band adds very little cost. The quad band FT8900R is only $20 more than the similarly featured dual band FT8800R.
T!
