G’day
Thanks very much to all those who contributed to the thread following my ‘FT8 -
the end of 160m old school DXing?’ post. Here is a summary of what appeared in
my ‘In Box’.
First, special thanks to CJ Johnson WT2P for bravely giving the ‘new school’
perspective and actually taking radio, in FT-8 form, into his workplace . As CJ
says, FT-8 is just another natural progression of the hobby, which actually
appeals to the ‘20-somethings’ we need to join us (and who just happened to be
brought up with lots of screens rather than cardboard loudspeakers and bakelite
headphones). Vive la difference!
In regard to the emails received via the reflector or privately, there were
three things that came through very loud and clear (actually deafening).
1. There are lots of long-time, old-school topbanders (and 6m users) like me
who enjoy chasing weak signal DX on CW and SSB and are now worried about the
future of this activity because of the current high usage rates of FT-8 on
those bands. Always better when you aren’t alone!
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2. We can band together and do something about this - the solution for us old
school ops who want to keep CW and SSB vital on the two magic bands is to go
back to first principles – lots of CQing, tuning the band regularly and
answering CQs – rather than just watching our bandscopes and DX clusters. We
all know that only activity breeds more activity. Duuh! (I feel really stupid
now).
As JC N4IS said:
”With the computer our habits are different. Nowadays we turn [to] the PC first
and if we see a spot or a RBN entry we try to call.... We should [go] back to
call[ing] CQ for the fun to work someone. Call CQ five times and then turn your
computer on, every day. If all of us do it once a day, the band will be fun
again.”
We’ve all got CW memory and/or voice keyers – if we don’t want to actually CQ
manually, we can use them for lots of daily CQing and make sure we answer
anyone who calls us.
We also need to answer those who we hear calling CQ to keep the band alive,
even if we worked them the day before – as we did in the older, less hurried,
more polite days of yore.
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3. The ARRL could be encouraged to change the DXCC program and add a new
mode-specific category for the evolving ‘new wave’ (i.e. WSJT) family of
digital modes, where contacts can be made with stations that are basically
inaudible (i.e. as Hans SM6CVX suggested, where the signal levels are –1dB or
more below the noise).
To keep the peace with existing DXCC holders, one potential solution is those
traditional modes which generally need audibility – typically CW, SSB, RTTY
and PSK-31 – would count for the long-standing Mixed mode, but the inaudible
‘new wave’ digi modes would not.
However, the growing and evolving family of inaudible ‘new wave’ digital modes
could have a whole, bright, shiny new DXCC category to themselves, for which
all the current WSJT modes and their evolving, successor modes would count.
This ‘new wave’ digital award could have a new cool, 21st century-looking
certificate (are holograms 21st century?) , would give new wave digital
operators the chance to be among the first to get this award and would also
give the ARRL DXCC program the chance to potentially get some extra revenue in
issuing these awards. Of course, all the contacts would be submitted
electronically. ;-)
Another different but related idea came from Mark K3MSB - why not ask the ARRL
to consider awarding band-specific DXCC awards with mode endorsements (i.e.
160M DXCC-CW, 160M DXCC-FT8, 40M-Digital, 17M-SSB etc).
If we want to get this kind of change to the ARRL’s DXCC program, then as Mark
suggests we need to make our voices heard. This could be simply done by
creating an electronic petition to the ARRL signed by as many current members
of the DXCC program as possible, clearly spelling out what sort of change the
petitioners think is needed. There is a great website which can be used for
this purpose - see https://www.change.org/start-a-petition – and it should be
easy to publicise a petition of this kind, using reflectors.
For many years I was involved in administrating amateur soccer and have
experience of using electronic petitions as a means of showing an
administrative body the level of support for specific changes to the way the
game is run. In my experience, electronic petitions are a viable way to get
rules changed these days. Some people hate them, but BIG petitions actually do
get results.
Hope the above summary of ideas was of interest. Please excuse me now and I’ll
get along to the low end of 160m, start doing something practical like CQing
and stop worrying about the demise of old school radio (which I’ve probably
greatly exaggerated).
Vy 73
Steve, VK6VZ/G3ZZD
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