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Topband: A way forward to keep 'old school' modes vibrant alongside FT-8

To: "Topband reflector" <topband@contesting.com>
Subject: Topband: A way forward to keep 'old school' modes vibrant alongside FT-8? (long)
From: "Steve Ireland" <vk6vz@arach.net.au>
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2017 21:43:17 +0800
List-post: <mailto:topband@contesting.com>
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!
---------------------------------------
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.     
--------------------------------------------
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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