Where is 6 meters open right now?
A live world map of 50 MHz signals, built from thousands of automatic reception reports and updated every five minutes. See which paths are open, how far signals are reaching, and what the sun is doing.
Live paths, last 15 minutes
Each line is a station heard by another station on 50 to 54 MHz. Shading shows night and the gray line.
Longest paths
Select a row to highlight it on the map.
| Heard | By | km | Mode | SNR |
|---|
Open paths by continent
DX paths over 900 km between continents, approximated from grid locators.
Activity, last 24 hours
DX paths over 900 km in each 15-minute window, times in UTC.
Space weather
NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center
DX cluster spots
Operators reporting 6 meter contacts by hand.
| UTC | kHz | DX | Country | Spotter | Comment |
|---|
Most widely heard
Transmitting stations heard by the most receivers.
| Station | Grid | Heard by | Farthest km |
|---|
Sporadic-E season
Typical seasonal likelihood for today's date.
Why 6 meters is called the magic band
The 6 meter amateur band (50 to 54 MHz in the Americas, 50 to 52 MHz in much of the world) sits between the shortwave bands and VHF. Most of the time it behaves like VHF, with signals reaching only a few hundred kilometers. Then, sometimes with no warning, a patch of dense ionization forms in the E layer and stations 1,500 km away come in at full strength. Openings can last minutes or hours and can link continents. That unpredictability is why operators call it the magic band, and why a live view like this one is useful.
This page watches 6 meter activity around the world so you can see openings as they happen. Paths in cyan and green are usually sporadic-E. Amber and pink paths are longer: multi-hop sporadic-E, trans-equatorial propagation, or F2 near solar maximum. The map guide explains exactly how the data is collected and classified.