My Ham Radio year

[randy]

A year ago (30 June 20) I received my repaired IC-706MKIIG radio and set it back up in the shack.

Thought I'd try that FT8 digital mode folks were talking about and was surprised to make a contact my first try.

During that one year period I've:
Made 3,507 contacts
Earned my Digital Worked All States (WAS) award
Earned Digital WAS for the 40 Meter band
Worked 91 confirmed countries
Worked 49 states on 80,30,20 and 17 meter bands
Made my first 6 Meter contacts (25 states and 4 countries so far)
Furthest contact was with an Australian station: 9,782 miles

All made with 40 watts of power and mostly on a simple sloper wire antenna

So you really can do a lot without a lot.

[SoupOrMan]

FT8 seems odd. Is it just for making basic data contact or can you actually do phone over it?

[randy]

Just the basic data contacts.

IOW about the same as when you do a contest or DX Expedition on phone; exchange grid square, signal reports, and then 73. In many ways I prefer it to voice, not just because I could never have done as much with my limited equipment and current band conditions on phone.

There are other digital modes that are more conversation friendly (such as JS8Call), but I haven't done much with them (yet). I did some PSK31 a few years ago but most of that activity seems to have moved to the newer modes. These are all keyboard to keyboard data modes, not voice.

There are some Digital Voice modes on HF, but I haven't seen a lot about them. The more common voice modes (DStar, Fusion, DMR) are on VHF/UHF.

I know it's sometimes a little confusing when someone starts talking about digital modes and you need to figure out if they mean voice or data depending on the band they are using.

Oh, and I just confirmed West Virginia on 30 Meters, so I now have Digital WAS on 30.

[SoupOrMan]

Good work on that last contact!

FT8 sounds like a pretty useful system for contests.

I'm hoping the DStar net starts up again here in central IL. Since my HT is DStar capable, I should give it a shot. I registered my callsign and have the area repeater set up in my D74, so is there anything else needed?

[randy]

Good work on that last contact!

Thanks. I just need AK on 80, and MI on 20 and 17 to make it a clean sweep from 17-80. Then onto the other bands.

I'm hoping the DStar net starts up again here in central IL. Since my HT is DStar capable, I should give it a shot. I registered my callsign and have the area repeater set up in my D74, so is there anything else needed?

Not that I can think of, but I'm not a DStar guy. You should probably contact whomever runs that DStar repeater to see.

FT8 sounds like a pretty useful system for contests.

As I understand it FT8 was an offshoot of software designed for weak signal work, such as Moon Bounce (AKA EME, Earth-Moon-Earth) operations or Meteor Scatter.

The reason I've done as well as I have with my equipment limitations and band conditions the past year is that you can decode signals as much as -24dB below the noise floor of a band. Which means I can decode and make contact with a station I can't hear by ear and not really showing up on the signal waterfall display, but the software is able to decode his data from the received signal. It also crams a lot of signals into pretty small slice of bandwidth.

[randy]

Here's what I mean by the waterfall display: This is a 2.5 KHz slice of spectrum starting at 14.074MHz on 20 Meters.

Each of those vertical lines is a separate transmission from a station.

Each one is 50Hz wide.

The brighter the color, the stronger the signal I am receiving at my station. Some of these are multiple stations transmitting very close or on top of each other (as they can't necessarily hear each other, but I can see both of them)

WSJTX FT8 Waterfall 20M5Jul21.jpg

[randy]

And here is the station list of what I am decoding from that waterfall:

WSJTX FT8 Band Activity 20M5Jul21.jpg

Green represents a CQ from station I have already worked. The other color codes are kind of convoluted and I really don't keep track of them.

Non-highlighted lines are two other stations in a QSO

This is showing CQs from Canada, Belgium, the US, Brazil, Italy and France.

[randy]

Here's my map from a related piece of software called Grid Tracker:

GT map 5Jul21.jpg

The green lines are signal paths to stations that have heard me in the past 10 minutes (the green dots at the end of each green line). This comes from stations around the world sending their heard stations reports over the internet to a site called PSK Reporter.

From the pattern of the lines (effectively the radiation pattern of my wire sloper antenna), you can probably see why I'm having problems getting MI to complete my 20M WAS My out put power is 40W

The colored squares represent Maidenhead grid squares with active stations. These correlate to the heard list in the previous picture.

[randy]

As long as I'm geeking out, here's a picture of all of the grids I have worked with FT8, all bands, since I started last year (red are confirmed, yellow are worked but not confirmed by the other station):

GT Worked Grids 5Jul21.jpg

[Weetabix]

Very impressive!

Can you tell us about your antenna? I've got a small yard, and I've not really figured out what to do for an HF antenna.

How about a picture of your shack?

We've had nearly constant "events" for years, it feels like. When the remodel is done and Oldest Daughter's wedding is past, I hope to be able to get something of a station set up to play with some of this.