Topband: Timor Leste report #8

[Jim Brown]

On 11/22/2023 1:43 PM, Dietmar Kasper wrote:
> As soon as I was away the station was hijacked by the FT-lovers to play their computer games.

It is long past time for us to grow past prejudices and learn to use new 
techniques. This all reminds me of the fighting against the adoption of 
that crazy new mode called SSB! I have been primarily a CW op all of my 
life, 67 years so far in ham radio.

FT-modes are weak signal modes -- the digital encoding provides about 10 
dB advantage over CW with great operators on both ends. They fight 
against the major enemy of our QSOs, noise of all sorts. Just as CW 
offers an advantage of about 10 dB over SSB. This is a VERY big deal, 
because man-made electrical noise has increased by 20 dB in the last two 
decades.

All of these modes use radios, antennas, and propagation through the 
ionosphere. The operators still most build all of that stuff, do it 
well, understand all of it, and study propagation so that they know when 
to operate. George Wallner, AA7JV, one of the smartest guys doing 
DXpeditions in the last 20 years, studied the logs from many of his 
activations, and found that nearly all of the most difficult QSOs 
occurred during one or two nights of a 2-3 week expedition. George 
realized the advantage of FT8, and developed a system to diplex both CW 
and FT8 transmitters into the same TX antenna, and narrow bandpass 
filters for RX antennas.

73, Jim K9YC