[CQ-Contest] ARRL to allow self-spotting in contests

[David Gilbert]

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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