[Elecraft] FT8 - was "On Second Thought, I'll Take The Stairs"

[Paul Christensen]

>"And I have one that says "RTTY" but it's now a Digital DXCC.  I had to
resort to FT8 to work Monaco to get on the Digital Honor Roll, with the
other 330 having been on RTTY."

Just to quickly add my input before the topic is canned.

I'm not enamored with FT8 but just for grins, I conducted an FT8 experiment
a few months ago to see how many countries I could work with no antenna
terminated at the end of a broken open-feeder transmission line.  That's
right - no antenna, just a hunk of balanced open feeder line that sits
unterminated on my backyard fence.  Using a 100W rig with output power
turned down to 20W, SWR is off-scale.  I work on my own gear.  If I blow it
up, so be it.  

Over a few weeks I worked about 35 countries on 20m and 11 countries on 40m,
all FT8 of course.    No antenna and sky high SWR.  By now, folks are
thinking."yeah no antenna, but your line is the antenna, balanced or not."
That's right.  There's just enough imbalance between the two conductor
feeders that the line has some radiation.  The imbalance is caused by the
usual culprits like proximity to aluminum gutters and some inherent
imbalance between the rig and feeder.  However, it just goes to show that
skill to make FT8 DX contacts rests largely with the algorithm.  Frankly,
most of the skill needed is in learning to install and configure the WSJT-X
software - which isn't difficult.  As such, I find it amusing that anyone
considers FT8 an accomplishment - and a semi-automatic one at that.  But for
those who feel it is an accomplishment, there's no point in denying their
satisfaction.

Paul  W9AC