Topband: The State of 160m

Jim Brown jim at audiosystemsgroup.com
Fri Jul 1 14:27:40 EDT 2022


On 7/1/2022 10:38 AM, Hans Hjelmström wrote:
> Interesting info. You do not hate FT 8 ,,, I do.
> 
> I consider FT 8 killing all challenge,personal efforts and operating skills.
> 
> Sorry its the start of the end of our hobby,made by FT 8

Hans,

You are seriously mistaken. The massive proliferation of RF noise is 
what's killing weak signal work on ALL ham bands and all modes. FT8, and 
other encoding modes developed by K1JT and his collaborators, have given 
us a weapon to combat that noise.

In response to Bob's excellent post, I'll add that far too many 
DXpeditioners exhibit massive ignorance of propagation on bands below 
20M. They are ignorant of the fact that gray line prop is good on 40M 
for two hours on BOTH the daylight AND the dark side of sunrise and 
sunset, for an hour on 80M, and for 30-40 minutes on 160M. FAR too often 
they shut down at the first sign of daylight, just when we start hearing 
them!

DXpeditioners also seem ignorant of what AA7JV observed first at Visalia 
and later at Dayton -- that the great openings on 160M tend to occur on 
one night out of a couple of weeks during an expedition, so that it's 
critical that the topband station be on the air on the two best weak 
signal modes, CW and FT8, whenever the band could be open. And to 
accomplish this, George developed a TX diplexer that allowed both CW and 
FT8 transmitters to simultaneously feed the TX antenna, and RX filters 
to allow RX antennas to reject the other mode's transmitter.

73, Jim K9YC


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