I always assumed that it had a lot to do with the amount of activity vs. finding someone. CW or other operators wanting to make a specific contact on a band or location, such as for an award, need some way to find a similar operator.
There is a smaller subset of digital hams and those digital hams mostly use PSK31. They only have need for extra help if they want to go beyond PSK31 and work less commonly used modes or for awards perhaps? No matter how much we have tried to promote the newer modes, some of which have special attributes such as being far more robust than PSK31, have ARQ capability that is not available to keyboard chat modes, etc., the reaction I have personally gotten from other hams is that PSK31 is good enough and when it doesn't work, they do other things. As a recent example, a ham from a nearby community is was introduced as the digital expert so I was very interested in seeing if he would be interested in working some of the new modes, especially because a large focus of his group was with public service communication. I was quite surprised when he seemed almost annoyed with me for even suggesting that any other digital modes exist than PSK31 or should even be used on the ham bands. Since most digital hams use only PSK31, and there are well known watering hole frequencies on the popular bands, they never need any help with internet coordination. If a given band is open, they can almost always find someone. By the way, what is the LOTW group intended to be used for? 73, Rick, KV9U Andrew O'Brien wrote: > -My sentiments exactly Bob. I have tried and tried over the years and cannot > figure out why the digital part of the K3UK Sked page is not used more. As > you know, the SKCC and LOTW K3UK Sked pages are used constantly. The irony > is that the SKCC and LOTW pages were established as after thoughts, the > digitalradio sked page was my first goal and the initial design code was > provided gratis by a member of this group N8FQ. > > Another irony is that the LOTW page that you suggested is quite often the > group that spurs people to try digital modes like Feld Held for the first > time. There are more digital mode "skeds" made via the LOTW page than the > digitalradio sked page. > > Andy K3UK > >
