>"And I have one that says "RTTY" but it's now a Digital DXCC. I had to resort to FT8 to work Monaco to get on the Digital Honor Roll, with the other 330 having been on RTTY."
Just to quickly add my input before the topic is canned. I'm not enamored with FT8 but just for grins, I conducted an FT8 experiment a few months ago to see how many countries I could work with no antenna terminated at the end of a broken open-feeder transmission line. That's right - no antenna, just a hunk of balanced open feeder line that sits unterminated on my backyard fence. Using a 100W rig with output power turned down to 20W, SWR is off-scale. I work on my own gear. If I blow it up, so be it. Over a few weeks I worked about 35 countries on 20m and 11 countries on 40m, all FT8 of course. No antenna and sky high SWR. By now, folks are thinking."yeah no antenna, but your line is the antenna, balanced or not." That's right. There's just enough imbalance between the two conductor feeders that the line has some radiation. The imbalance is caused by the usual culprits like proximity to aluminum gutters and some inherent imbalance between the rig and feeder. However, it just goes to show that skill to make FT8 DX contacts rests largely with the algorithm. Frankly, most of the skill needed is in learning to install and configure the WSJT-X software - which isn't difficult. As such, I find it amusing that anyone considers FT8 an accomplishment - and a semi-automatic one at that. But for those who feel it is an accomplishment, there's no point in denying their satisfaction. Paul W9AC ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
