All,
I worked the ARRL RTTY Roundup this weekend using FT8 and based on that I am comfortable saying the conversion to Version 2.0 Is pretty much complete. I had a good time, with 260 Q's and 66 multipliers. I could have worked more but, alas, I fell asleep at 02:00 and didn't wake up till 08:00 local time. The rest of the story is when my wife missed me in bed at 04:00 she was just sure I had had a heart attack and she would find me slumped over my radios. What I had done was pulled my daughters exercise mat out and curled up on the floor. Of course, she comes around the corner and sees me laying on the floor. Oh,dear, going to take a few dinners and lots of flowers to smooth this one over!
A few observations:
- Using 40m as an example the contest crowd and the casual users sorted themselves out nicely, causal users at 7074 KHz and contest folks at 7080 KHz.
- The contest log that comes out of WSJT-X is very complete and became my gold standard against which I checked N1MM
- Although I didn't get it completely right .N1MM does a nice job of scoring and managing dups - there is a bit of work to do here but it works very nicely once you understand it and read all of the directions.
- I like the real RST reports that come out of -X. There is a lot of data here that could be mined, analysed and understood. Most of my Q's ranged between 529 and 549 with an occasional 579/589. Not surprisingly 589 corresponded with a fire engine red trace on the waterfall. I ran between 50 and 75 watts inot a vertical on 80, 40, 15 and 10 and a dipole on 20 meters. My best DX was a ZL on 20
All good stuff and I really don't think we need to worry about Version 1.9.1 in the contest in two weeks.
Johnny