Topband: FT8 - the end of 160m old school DXing? (long)

[CJ Johnson]

Steve, as a relatively “young” ham living in a populous area, I have some
things to offer to this thread...

To give you some background: I’m 36, been licensed since 1994. Did the
whole progression before code was eliminated all the way to Extra. Took
electronics classes in high school and when the instructor found out I was
a ham, instantly gave me more detailed and demanding assignments. That’s
all fun, I love CW as well but now, as a technologist, I love the fusion of
technology and radio. It makes it interesting.

I was at first skeptical of FT-8 on the HF bands after using it for 6M weak
signal stuff. That (in my mind) was the band for this type of stuff. I can
accept my line of thinking was wrong.

One can on any given evening call CQ in the CW sub band and get picked up
by skimmers around the world, yet not get a reply. This was even before
FT-8 came on the scene. I can call CQ on SSB and get someone who wants to
talk about politics, health problems, or some other inane subject that
definitely will be boring (if you want to talk about trading on a
investment bank desk, statistics, structuring MBS products or the challenge
of refactoring a large system then i’d love to chat). To each their own.
I’m not judging.

With all of the hubaloo expressed in the past day or so I got on FT-8 and
have had contacts.

It’s not the “end of radio” but rather another natural progression of the
hobby. I even have my co-workers now interested (all 20-somethings) in ham
radio in the office just because during the day today I dedicated one of my
monitors to my station at home running FT8 on 15 & 20. They were curious
and I got the questions of “isn’t ham radio just full of grumpy old people
hanging on to irrelevant technology and ideas?”

I replied: “no, this is a practical example of what ham radio was
originally conceived to accomplish... experimentation and the advancement
of technology”.

Ham Radio should not be “my way or the highway”.

73
WT2P

On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 3:25 AM Steve Ireland <vk6vz at arach.net.au> wrote:

> G’day
>
> As a committed (yeah, that’s probably the right word - complete with white
> jacket that laces up at the back) topbander since 1970, I’ve never been so
> intrigued and disturbed by anything on the band as the emergence of the
> Franke-Taylor FT-8 digital mode.
>
> For me, radio has always been all about what I audibly hear. I love all
> the sounds that radio signals make - and even miss the comforting sound of
> Loran that I grew up with around 1930kHz as a teenager in south-east
> England. Yeah, I am one sick puppy.
>
> With the emergence of high resolution bandscopes through SDR technology
> over the last decade, I embraced that as it meant that I could find what DX
> stations I wanted to hear and contact quicker and more easily (and, in
> particular, before those stations who didn’t have the same technology).
>
> It was really exciting and enhanced the sensual experience of radio by
> being able to see what I could hear (and no dinosaur me, I was an SDR fan
> boy!).
>
> During this period, there has also been an extraordinary development in
> digital radio modes, in particular by Joe Taylor K1JT.
>
> As a topbander I could see that these modes in which you ‘saw’ signals
> through the medium of computer screen or window as being a remarkable
> technical achievement, but had relatively little to do what I and the vast
> majority of active radio amateurs practiced as radio on 160m, as it had
> nothing to do with the audible.
>
> The good thing was that I could see that good old CW and Silly Slop Bucket
> (you can see where my prejudices lie) that I like to use were still the
> modes of choice for weak signal DX topband radio contact as these fancy
> digital modes were either very slow or, if they weren’t, were not good at
> dealing with signals that faded up and down or were covered in varying
> amounts of noise.
>
> While some amateurs seemed to have lost the pleasure of actually hearing
> signals in favour of viewing them on their computer screens, I felt secure
> that these digital modes were just a minor annoyance and any serious DXer
> or DXpedition was never going to seriously going to use them, particularly
> on my first and all-time love topband, for other than experimentation.
>
> Then, out of the blue, along comes FT-8. Joe and Steve Franke K9AN have
> quietly created the holy grail of digital operation with a mode that can
> have QSOs almost as fast as CW and SSB and over the last eight weeks 160m
> DXing has changed, perhaps for ever.
>
> Where once there were a few weak CW and SSB signals (I am in VK6, which is
> a looong way from anywhere with a population so we only ever hear a few), I
> can see that the busiest part of the band is 1840 kHz – FT-8 central.  On
> some nights I can see FT-8 signals on the band but no CW or SSB.
>
> There are countries I’ve dreamed for 20 years of hearing on 160m SSB/CW
> (for example, KG4) regularly appearing on DX clusters and I can see the
> heap of FT-8 activity on my band scope.
>
> Frustration sets in and I even downloaded the FT-8 software but, when it
> comes down to it,  I just can’t use it. My heart isn’t in it.
>
> My computer will be talking to someone else’s computer and there will be
> no sense of either a particular person’s way of sending CW or the tone of
> their voice (even the way some my SSB mates overdrive their transceivers is
> actually creating nostalgia in me). The human in radio has somehow been
> lost.
>
> I think back to my best-ever 160m SSB contact with Pedro NP4A and I can
> still hear the sound of his voice, his accent, when he came up out of the
> noise and to my amazement answered me on my second call, with real
> excitement in his voice. Pure radio magic!
>
> So I am sitting here, feeling depressed and wondering if overnight I have
> become a dinosaur and this is the beginning of the end of topband radio as
> I’ve always enjoyed it.
>
> Now, over to you other topbanders, especially those who have dabbled with
> FT-8 and live in more populous areas. Has the world really turned upside
> down and what do you think the future holds?
>
> Vy 73
>
> Steve, VK6VZ/G3ZZD
>
>
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