Topband: CQ Zones

[Jim Brown]

On 3/9/2021 3:50 PM, Martin Kratoska wrote:
> SECOND - am I allowed to differ between a QSO between living operators 
> (possibly friends) and two machines?

Martin,

As has been said of some American politicians, we are certainly entitled 
to our own opinions, but we are not entitled to our own facts. Your 
assumption that all users of digital modes are QSO machines is simply 
false. I have heard that there are "bad actors" using QSO machines, but 
the vast majority of users of these modes do not. And, frankly, I don't 
care about others cheating for things like this -- I simply take pride 
in what I can accomplish with the available tools. I don't care if 
others are using computers to copy code -- they're the ones missing out 
on the fun of CW. Indeed, our contesting club has close to two dozen 
no-code licensees who have become very good CW ops using their own ears. 
CWOPS, of which I'm a charter member (#69), was organized by NCCC 
members, among them my neighbor K6RB. You probably know about their CW 
tutoring program.

I use K1JT's modes for their intended purpose -- to make QSOs under very 
difficult conditions and with different sorts of propagation. Except for 
DXpeditions, I use them only on 160M to work EU from my QTH in San 
Francisco, and on 6M to work multi-hop E-skip, ionospheric scatter, and 
meteor scatter. FT8, for example, has an advantage of at least 10 dB 
over CW with great ops on both ends. I've heard five CW signals from EU 
in the past seven or eight seasons, and only two of them have heard me. 
Their newer mode, FST4, has an additional advantage of 3-10 dB, 
depending on the TX/RX sequence length.

It pleases me that you've found my work useful.

73, Jim K9YC