I had an FAE 400 QSO (barely) with a station on 20 meters earlier today. We did eventually lose the link, but there were times that we got some reasonable throughput. I increased power to about 50 watts and was able to get through to his end fairly well for much of the time (about 40 wpm). I was just barely able to copy him on the waterfall and just barely hear him in the noise. If this had been another sound card digital mode, I am not sure how well we would have been able to get accurate communications. As you can guess the biggest plus for FAE 400 is the ability to wait out severe QSB, one of the banes of low power operation. Oh I did not mention that the other station was running QRP at 5 watts.
After that contact, I moved around to another of the recommended frequencies from VE5MU (30 meters) and was away from the rig for varying periods of time. I did not notice until later that there were two other stations who had called CQ on FAE 400. I tried calling CQ but by then neither were around any longer. This evening around 7 pm local time I called CQ for a while on 3589 but I admit I was a bit disappointed that I did not have any luck. Until I realized that I had accidentally used the HFLink frequency. I had added the VE5MU recommended frequencies to my cheat sheet index card and managed to misread from the previous list. I dropped down to the recommended 3584 and called CQ and then shortly after that saw non other than Bill, N9DSJ, calling from IL (I am in SW WI). We were able to connect but let me tell you this was an excellent test of this mode tonight. The FoF2 is around 2 MHz so 80 meters is extremely poor for NVIS. More like backscatter:) Even so, we were able to do fairly well and at times I could not keep up with the typing speed. Since you can not backspace for an error (similar to RTTY) I do tend to make some xxx characters at times HI HI. Bill and I switched over to 4 baud DEX without FEC and while this mode worked fairly well considering the horrible signals, it was not 100% on my end and of course with much slower throughput. He printed me better though but I was running 35+ watts. I just want to suggest to those of you who have not tried this mode, to give it a workout, even with bad conditions. It is such a treat to be able to print perfect copy under those conditions and often do it at faster than 40 wpm. I have not had any other sound card mode that can do this. And don't worry about an "over" command. Just type on the keyboard and the sent and received text are spaced far apart in separate windows so you won't get them confused. Those recommended frequencies are: 3584 7038 10136 14094 18104 21094 73, Rick, KV9U
