[CQ-Contest] Contesting and the FT8 Revolution

[Jim Brown]

On 6/19/2021 9:48 AM, Peter Voelpel wrote:
> Yes, for those who enjoy the use of the internet for contesting.

WSJT modes make no more use of the internet than contesting or chasing 
DX with CW, SSB, or RTTY. Just as with those modes, the internet is used 
with WSJT modes for spotting and the study of propagation.

An excellent use of the RBN system is the comparison of one antenna to 
another under real world conditions. I used it this way over the winter 
to chase an issue with one of my 160M TX antennas. I transmitted TEST 
K9YC six times in a row on one antenna, then TEST KU6W (or club station) 
six times on the other, put the spots for each into a spreadsheet. I 
repeated this procedure more than a dozen times, in order to average out 
the effects QSB and other variations in propagation. I then averaged the 
results from each spotting location for each antenna, also noting 
azimuth for each spotting location, since both antennas have modest 
directivity.

I repeated this series of tests over several nights. Analysis of the 
data made it clear that one of the antennas has a problem of about 9 dB, 
that I hope to troubleshoot and correct over the summer. W6GJB used this 
process quite effectively to evaluate an 80M vertical we had designed 
and built for Field Day, compared to an inverted Vee. The vertical won 
by a fair margin.

73, Jim K9YC