[Elecraft] Boldly OT: 6 meter Sporadic-E season and the FT-8 microjuggernaut

[Josh Fiden]

Referenced to the noise floor at what bandwidth? If you're claiming FT8 
can copy sigs 20 dB below what you can copy on CW, that's nonsense and 
not even true for JT65. Anecdotal info from hardcore 6m guys (translate: 
real world results) say they're not working anything they couldn't copy 
on CW. It's a PITA with everyone crammed in a few kHz and a couple bad 
sigs wipe it out. In practice, it might be a few dB better than copy by 
ear with a narrow filter if you're decent at ESP level copy.

That said, I've been using JT65 on 6m EME for several years and love it. 
I'm not at all a luddite about this. Just trying to be realistic.

I sure hope the whole June VHF contest doesn't ignore CW & SSB, and try 
to squeeze onto 313 !

YMMV

73,
Josh W6XU

On 6/1/2018 4:38 PM, David Gilbert wrote:
> that it is nominally capable of -20 db decoding.  >Referenced to the 
> noise floor<