Topband: J28MD, conditions

[Michael Tope]

I spent all morning calling T88WA on 160CW FT8. They responded to my 
call twice in a row in the wee hours of the morning when their signal 
strength was modest (~R -15), but I never saw the "RR73", message so I 
kept trying to work them for hours until the sun came up. In the lead up 
to sunrise they became very loud for quite a while (something like R 
+1), so I was kind of dumbfounded that they never responded again while 
stations with whom I am normally competitive were getting through. I was 
beginning to think that something was wrong with my antenna, that 
perhaps copper thieves had made off with all my ground radials. I walked 
outside after sunrise to make sure they were still there. This 
afternoon, I checked the coax loss and it was reasonable (~0.5dB). What 
the heck?

After all the aforementioned head scratching, I discovered this 
afternoon much to my surprise that I am in the log. They were splitting 
streams, so all I can figure is that they sent the RR73 in a split 
stream and it was too weak for me to decode; and then they just ignored 
me afterwards because they considered me a dupe. I would have been quite 
happy to have avoided all those extra hours of calling and gone to bed 
instead had I know I was in the log.  My experience with FT8 is pretty 
limited. Is this a common problem?

73, Mike W4EF....................

On 11/7/2022 12:18 PM, Wes wrote:
> IMHO, that's a bug.
>
> On 11/6/2022 7:53 PM, Chortek, Robert L. wrote:
>> That’s standard F/H.
>>
>>   If they put your call in the queue, and your transmission times out 
>> (or you quit calling), the software activates your transmitter.  In 
>> effect you had already worked him (you just didn’t know it yet) - not 
>> really but sort of.
>>
>> 73,
>>
>> Bob/AA6VB
>> Robert L. Chortek