I think FT8 has a bright future for VHF Contests and Field Day, but I really
struggled with it in the CQ WW VHF contest last weekend.
I believe I have discovered a bug that affects the couple of dozen hams who go
roving in VHF Contests. The contest rules say that as a rover,
we must use /R after our callsign. I entered N6GP/R and my grid into WSJT-8,
and tried FT8 during the contest a bit. I had Autosequencing turned on, and I
kept getting stuck in the signal report part of the QSO. I was receiving
signal report, and sending a report over and over again. My QSOs were almost
taking as much time to complete as a JT65 QSO!
I emailed Pat, N6RMJ, with whom I had one of these elongated FT8 QSOs. I
asked if there was some problem with my signal, and he said no. I asked him to
provide our QSO out of his ALL.TXT file.
N6RMJ is running WSJT-X V 1.8 r 14 with Win 7 Pro
Here are the QSO exchanges from the N6RMJ perspective
170716_193445 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: CQ N6RMJ DM14
193500 -10 0.6 1639 ~ N6RMJ N6GP DM14
170716_193515 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: N6GP N6RMJ -10
193530 -9 0.1 1777 ~ DE N6GP/R R-15
170716_193545 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: N6GP N6RMJ -10
193600 -9 0.6 1704 ~ DE N6GP/R R+00
170716_193615 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: N6GP N6RMJ -10
170716_193615 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: N6GP N6RMJ RRR
193630 -9 0.6 1633 ~ DE N6GP/R R-19
170716_193645 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: N6GP N6RMJ RRR
193700 -10 0.6 1705 ~ DE N6GP/R 73
170716_193715 Transmitting 50.31 MHz FT8: N6GP N6RMJ 73
It appears that something went wrong with his autosequencer at 19:35:45 and
19:36:15 because it was not seeing my signal reports and continued to send his
signal reports. Looks like he manually intervened during the 19:36:15
transmission with a mouse click to send the RRR.
I am not fully versed on how the autosequencer works. but for whatever reason,
the "DE N6GP/R R-15" seemed to cause the problem. Is the problem that the
N6RMJ callsign is omitted, or that my callsign changed from the original N6GP
to N6GP/R ?
For completeness, here is my side of the QSO from my ALL.TXT
N6GP/R running WSJT-X 1.8.0 rc1 with Window 7 Starter
193445 -4 -0.1 1739 ~ CQ N6RMJ DM14
170716_193500 Transmitting 50.313 MHz FT8: N6RMJ N6GP DM14
193515 -5 -0.1 1739 ~ N6GP N6RMJ -10
170716_193530 Transmitting 50.313 MHz FT8: DE N6GP/R R-15
193545 -10 -0.1 1812 ~ N6GP N6RMJ -10
170716_193600 Transmitting 50.313 MHz FT8: DE N6GP/R R+00
193615 0 -0.1 1740 ~ N6GP N6RMJ -10
170716_193630 Transmitting 50.313 MHz FT8: DE N6GP/R R-19
193645 -9 -0.1 1740 ~ N6GP N6RMJ RRR
170716_193700 Transmitting 50.313 MHz FT8: DE N6GP/R 73
Tnx & 73,
Tim N6GP
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