OK Jim, as you wish. WSJT modes began to be widely used a decade ago on our HF bands, and more than two decades ago on the VHF bands. These digital protocols have attracted a huge following world-wide, but nevertheless the activity uses a tiny fraction of the spectrum assigned to Amateur Radio.
This public forum is intended for technical discussion of the WSJT weak-signal digital protocols and their related software. It's hardly the best place to expand further on why you would have done such an overwhelmingly better job of selecting the tiny spectral slices conventionally used for the WSJT modes. I've been a ham for more than seventy years. I'm well aware of the many changes taking place on our bands over this time. Sensible band planning is important, and by all means you should devise and promote improved plans if you have good ideas addressing and accommodating the many competing interests. Radio waves don't recognize national or even continental boundaries, so band plans must be workable on a world-wide basis. Remember that people generally resist change unless the proposed change brings clearly recognizable benefits. Finally: a reasoned and collaborative approach has a much greater chance of success than outbursts about the "major errors," "massive failures," [etc., etc., ...] that you think have been made years ago, by others. -- 73, Joe, K1JT ________________________________ From: Jim Brown via wsjt-devel <wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> Sent: Friday, June 6, 2025 3:14 PM To: wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net <wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> Cc: Jim Brown <k...@audiosystemsgroup.com> Subject: Re: [wsjt-devel] WSJT-X - E.O.L.? Hi Joe, On 6/6/2025 8:42 AM, Joseph Taylor via wsjt-devel wrote: > We (developers of the digital protocols in WSJT and its sister programs) > have never dictated any band usage plans or unilaterally set any rules > for particular frequencies. But when you plugged default frequencies into you software, you DID, by default, establish those frequencies. On the contrary, we've always emphasized > that such plans must be community decisions. We have sought wide input > before making even tentative recommendations for a dial frequency for > exercising a potential new mode. Exactly WHERE did you solicit that input? But more to the point, why didn't you learn what was happening on other bands first? One of the most egregious of these decisions was to plant the FT4 frequency in the middle of 40M CW, in a part of the band that is widely used by QRP operations, county expeditions, POTA, SOTA, and QRS CW (QRS is slower speed). And I DID respond, VERY loudly to that decision. I could be wrong, but I don't recall > that you ever responded to any of these requests for input, when we made > them. Of course I didn't respond to requests in a space where I wasn't listening. On 6/6/2025 10:57 AM, Shirley Márquez Dúlcey wrote: > That 3 kHz slice that is being occupied by FT8 on most bands is > supporting DOZENS of simultaneous QSOs when the band is open. That's > spectral efficiency that no other popular mode can match, not even CW. > Each signal on FT8 is about 50 Hz wide, so in theory there could be 60 > active QSOs without mutual interference. I'm well aware of the spectral efficiency of the wonderful modes that Joe and his team have developed. That's irrelevant. I've made great use of several of them going back to when W6CQZ had a multi-decoder for JT65. But you've missed the point I've made -- these watering holes are 2.8 kHz, but you, and other users of various digital modes, have spaced them at 10 kHz intervals, which for users of other modes, like CW, RTTY, and SSB, that are not "channel-based," to lose 7 kHz of spectrum for each of these watering holes. Why do they (I say we, because I use those modes during contests) lose that space? Because users of these modes fail to follow the FUNDAMENTAL rule of ham radio since its beginning century ago -- to not interfere with existing activity on a frequency, which requires LISTENING on that frequency before transmitting. And, by the nature of how software for these digital modes work, the user cannot listen to the frequency on which he/she is transmitting -- we hear only that 2.8 kHz bandwidth, of which we're using only a few hundred Hz. Remember -- with a dial frequency of 7,046 kHz and an offset of 500 Hz, I'm transmitting on 7046.5 kHz. When I'm making CW or RTTY QSOs on that frequency, an FT4 operator firing up on that frequency is interfering with me, violating that fundamental rule! When I'm looking for a frequency to use, I listen, AND I look at a waterfall showing activity on the frequency for a while. For CW, a frequency is a few hundred Hz wide, for RTTY, it's 300-400 Hz wide. I can't count the number of times I've been running on a frequency for 10-20 minutes and have a digital signal come up on top of me. 73, Jim K9YC _______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
_______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
