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

[Jim Rhodes]

Sure wish I could put up such a "no antenna" antenna from my apartment
where the noise level is often 20 or more dB over S9. Working any DX on
even FT8 is a real rare occurence from here where I have a mobile antenna
working against an iron railing on my second floor balcony.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:05 Paul Christensen <w9ac at arrl.net> wrote:

> >"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
>
>
>
>
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