FT8 is terrific for what it was intended. I've made a couple thousand
contacts with it on every band from 160m to 6m. It happens to be a
really crummy contesting mode, though.
Think of things this way. Modern rigs with heavy DSP innards perform
all sorts of digital (i.e., mathematical) processes on the received
signal before reconstructing it to analog in the case of CW and SSB.
The output is transparent to the operator. There's really no reason at
all why the kind of precoding used by FT8 couldn't also be performed on
the transmitted signal with corresponding decoding of the received
signal before being outputted, also in analog form transparent to the
operator. The output doesn't have to be text on the screen. It can be
machine generated CW, maybe even SSB, and there wouldn't be QRN. The
only difference is that that kind of precoding and decoding carries with
it some formatting requirements ... fixed bandwidth, fixed length of
message bursts, etc. With proper design those constraints could be made
to almost invisible to the user ... most significantly for contesting.
The overall benefit, of course, being considerably better weak signal
performance.
73,
Dave AB7E
On 2/18/2022 4:20 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
On 2/18/2022 9:17 AM, David Gilbert wrote:
It should have enhanced the hobby for all of us, especially for us
contesters since almost all of our transmissions come from keypresses
in a logging program anyway.
Over a period of ten years or more, K1JT and his team have developed
an ever expanding suite of software for the exchange of minimal
information a variety of difficult propagation conditions, each of
which has its own challenges. FT8 is only one of those transmission
modes. I use their modes in the manner they intended -- meteor
scatter, tropo, ionospheric scatter, Es, and F2 on 6M; DXpeditions on
the HF bands; difficult circuits on 160M; low power DX on 60M. I've
yet to be drawn to HF contesting with it.
And their suite HAS enhanced the hobby for me a lot, and, I'd guess,
for hundreds of thousands of hams stuck in apartments where even
minimal antennas are a challenge.
73, Jim K9YC
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