[Elecraft] The Gentlemen's Band

[W0MU Mike Fatchett]

Well said.

Over 100 of my 700 and growing FT8 contacts have been on 160.        OH 
NO!  Ham radio is doomed. <smirk>  It seems that FT8 users are about the 
only using the band.    I might have 3 DX contacts.  I am certain that 
300 countries is going to be a long long adventure for FT8 on 160.  I 
doubt there will be an OT op still alive when or it if happens.

W0MU


On 10/29/2017 5:19 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
> 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
>
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