For those who try out 30m and don't simply give up after endless CQ with no answers, eventually whether it is by luck of getting QSO or by RBN reports or WSPR reports, will know that 30m is actually a band that usually performs better than 40m. So WHY is everyone on 40m?
There are a few answers to this question, in my opinion and from my experience:
- 40m has a popular reputation, in large part because phone operators can use it. 30m cannot be used for phone. So even CW operators keep hearing about 40m. Even those who should know better, such as some very well known (and the most popular) YouTubers constantly forget about 30m when they give presentations on antennas and propagation. Why? Because they rarely, or never, use CW. So they simply seem to forget that 30m exists.
- 40m has more cases of NVIS, meaning short range contacts. Why? Because on 40m even a "high" dipole is really mostly a cloud warmer. It'd need to be close to 20m (certainly more than 10 or 15m up) to perform reasonably well on longer distances. Thus, taking GB-land as an example, 40m is more suited to inter-G contacts than 30m. However, NVIS is also present on 30m some times, but not as much as on 40m. Sometimes but more rarely, NVIS may also work on 20m.
- The above two factors, lack of publicity and activity, are two main reasons. There are others: many people have antenna that may not work on 30m, for example, a 40m EFHW will work on 40, 20, 15, 10m. But 30m antenna are also very easy to make and put up, even easier than a 40m antenna, and will perform much better given the same height and space. A ground plane, a dipole, multi-band doublet, EFHW (the full sized EFHW already works on 30m as does an 80m dipole), even a modified EFHW, these are easy antennae to make for 30m.
If you find that you can get your signal as far as a certain country on 40m, it will go (much) further on 30m. Basically when the path is in darkness, the entire half of the planet. When it is in light, you'll get decent coverage for one hop off the E or F layer, meaning strong inter-Europe contacts, or from one side of G to the other, but during the day you may also find shorter distance contacts.
In summary: 30m is truly a hidden gem. Most hams simply do not know about it, yes they've heard OF it but they don't really know ABOUT it. It can be disappointing that your signal goes all the way from G to ZL picked up on the RBN but no one answers your CQ calls. So we'd like to put some heads together on how to improve activity on 30m, and especially focus such activity into the friendly "TOP 9" even "TOP 5" of the band, that is, 10120-10130. Any ideas?