I might be contrarian in my view, but in many ways FT8 has piqued my interest
to some level for perhaps becoming more interested in VHF contesting and DX’ing
again. What drove the stake through the heart of VHF contesting for me was the
free for all of allowing self-spotting and QSO scheduling and coordination via
any means real-time in the contest. That 100% totally killed the fun of VHF
contesting for me. And it has had devastating effects on the amount of CQ’ing
and band tuning that now occurs.
I already know that once I know who a station is, where they are, on what
frequency, and that they have X amount of power into antenna system of size Y,
that I can in all likelihood work them. That is pretty much a given. The fun of
VHF contesting for me always was always about finding them or drawing them out
by scouring the bands RX wise and visually, spraying CQs as much as I could,
and in as many directions as I could, for as much of the entire contest time
period as possible. And while doing that, be continually reading the subtle
cues of band condition shifts and where the propagation paths may be enhanced
or be opening to, and then adjusting my operating accordingly. Just following
DX spotting aids or scheduled Q’s does none of that. And for me, “just making
the Q” was at best 25% of the fun, and when running the bands was even less
than that.
So what has happened the last few years with all the real-time Q scheduling and
DX cluster, and QSO chat pages is that vast majority of people are now either
waiting for posts on those various web pages or phone or texts requests to try
and make a Q from someone. Or otherwise watching for activity on the DX
spotting networks, they are not “operating” their radios. Because they are not
calling CQ much, not tuning around or watching the bands, and are very unlikely
to be turning antennas either. And those who do try to call CQ these days get
very few takers because no one is paying attention to the RF that is coming
down the antenna coax real-time.
What I find intriguing about FT8 is that you can run it very effectively with
ZERO Internet connectivity. What you see come across your WSJT-X screen is what
your antenna, your radio, and the in-shack gear attached to it was able to
extract from the RF hitting your station. It doesn’t really matter if your
shack is Internet connected or not. In my mind that is “radio” at its best.
Also WSJT provides built-in mechanism to call CQ a lot. That is a key component
for making Qs, always has been. Not sure why so few people in the past, or
even now, never bothered to try and setup voice keying. It just hasn’t been
that hard or expensive to do since cheap PCs have been around for 25+ years now.
And modes like FT8 do capture the subtle shifts in band conditions as they are
evolving real-time. Just like seat time doing SSB/CW did. Spotting networks are
always behind.
There are certainly plenty of operational shortcomings of WSJT and FT8 etal. as
has been discussed these last few days in numerous threads. But the potential
to have people once again be paying more attention to what has come down their
feed-lines vs. over the Internet or phones is certainly there. And to me that
is a very good thing.
Duane
N9DG
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