One of the frequent complaints you will hear about any band is, “the band(s) is dead.” When you see the activity increase as it does in contests, you sometimes wonder, “is a dead band really dead?” For VHF and above, I think there are two major ways we can do more to activate a potentially dead band. First, don’t just turn on the rig and tune around listening … stop and call CQ periodically to improve everyone’s chances of catching a band opening.
Then listen … before giving up. Many of us are monitoring calling frequencies like 50.125 or 222.1 MHz while doing
