[Elecraft] The Gentlemen's Band

[Jim Brown]

On 10/29/2017 12:21 PM, Bill Frantz wrote:
> Agreed, those bands have nice ops. 160M, the gentleman's band, also 
> deserves it's name. CW and digital are ways to avoid many of the 
> (censored) ops. 

While the OT CW ops on 160 still think it's the gentleman's band, a 
recent long thread on the Topband reflector has proved that to be dead 
wrong. The topic was the invasion of 160M by WSJT modes in the form of 
FT8. It doesn't seem to matter that the mode takes up only about 2 kHz, 
it's simply that it's not CW!

Bear in mind that these are guys who never call CQ, never answer a CQ 
unless it's a new entity, and many of them have some of the dirtiest CW 
rigs known to man. Far be it from them to respond to the weak CQ of a 
new CW op, who, after a few nights of this, gives up on the "gentleman's 
band."

By contrast, consider JT65 on 160M, which the "gentlemen" don't even 
know is there, but which on a typical evening last winter had 40 times 
more activity than CW (on a typical night, I rarely saw more than a 
single CW signal on my P3, and a few SSB ragchews. Except for occasional 
contests, CW on 160 is almost non-existent!

Last season, beginning in late Nov, I started monitoring JT65 on 160, 
hoping to work WV, SC, and VT, the last three states I need for CW QRP 
on that band. Within a few weeks, a sked yielded WV. Over the next few 
months, I let WSJT-X run all night and next morning, put the calls of 
all the stations I decoded into a spreadsheet. By the time I stopped 
doing that in early spring, I had logged more than 950 calls in all 
states except VT, most VE provinces, all continents except Antarctica, 
and about 20 countries. On a typical night I logged more than 50 stations.

The "gentlemen" most recently have gotten their tit in wringer about 
FT8. They feel that FT8 and JT65 devalues their 50+ years of DXCC 
chasing on the band, on CW, the only mode that real gentlemen operate, 
and ignoring the fact that some with the largest DXCC totals have 
achieved them by combining their operations from locations on the east 
coast and west of the Rockies. Earlier attempts to work RTTY on the band 
were pounded into oblivion.

73, Jim K9YC