10 meters vs 11 meter band activity

[jdobbs2001]

I was scanning around the 10 and 11 meter band on my drake r8b and interestingly enough the 11 meter illegal band ie 27.405 to 27.9 seems much much more active than 10 meters. Not only that but the people working 11 sound much more professional than the 75 meter operators.

Why is the 10 meter band not used as much for ham radio operations. There are openings but it seems like a neglected band.

 

[WB4CS]

That's an age old question that's been asked many times.

While there's no hard evidence to support an answer, I believe it's either/or of two things:

1) Too much listening and not enough "CQing". Many hams tend to scan a band and listen but hardly call CQ. If too many people are listening and not enough are talking, the band will sound dead even though it's fairly open.

2) The 11 Meter folks could be/probably are running quite a bit more power than they're supposed to be which gives the impression the band is more open than it actually is.

If you hear 11 meters and it sounds open, find a frequency on 10 meters and start calling CQ. You might be surprised at how many people are listening!

 

[TheSpaceMann]

I was scanning around the 10 and 11 meter band on my drake r8b and interestingly enough the 11 meter illegal band ie 27.405 to 27.9 seems much much more active than 10 meters. Not only that but the people working 11 sound much more professional than the 75 meter operators.

Why is the 10 meter band not used as much for ham radio operations. There are openings but it seems like a neglected band.

There are a great deal more CBers than Ham operators. The equipment is relatively inexpensive, and no license is required.

 

[DannyB1954]

Probably due to percentages. If you sell 5 times as many radios of one type, you will have a higher percentage of users on that band.
With that said however, I just bought a box of radio stuff on Ebay and in it was a Uniden President CB base station . I am in Nevada and could hear people in Hawaii and Florida. I doubt that they were transmitting on the legal 5 watts power output. Nobody local responded to my calls.

 

[K5MPH]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

That's an age old question that's been asked many times.

While there's no hard evidence to support an answer, I believe it's either/or of two things:

1) Too much listening and not enough "CQing". Many hams tend to scan a band and listen but hardly call CQ. If too many people are listening and not enough are talking, the band will sound dead even though it's fairly open.

2) The 11 Meter folks could be/probably are running quite a bit more power than they're supposed to be which gives the impression the band is more open than it actually is.

If you hear 11 meters and it sounds open, find a frequency on 10 meters and start calling CQ. You might be surprised at how many people are listening!

Some of us call these people sand bagers lol.....

 

[K7MH]

A lot of the reason is just that hams have more bands to be on at any given time. CB enthusiasts whether "freebanders" or not only have the one band. We are just spread out more on different bands. 20, 17, and 15 meters are all pretty active bands when 10 is open.