Jeff, KE9V, emailed me this morning with this little tidbit:
Did you notice that the Vermont QSO Party last weekend encouraged FT8/FT4 contacts on the WARC bands? See item #6 from their rule page:
The Vermont QSO Party will include and encourage operation on the WSJT digital modes of FT8, FT4 and others. However, these modes only encode the station’s GRID SQUARE and not state, province or county. For these modes, special rules come into play:
1. Stations can only count once per band for credit on digital modes. That is, if you work a station on both FT8 and RTTY on a particular band, it only counts once.
2. The number of FT8/FT4 multipliers (for Vermont stations) is the number of grid squares worked, divided by 4 and rounded DOWN.
3. The number of FT8/FT4 multipliers (for outside Vermont stations) is the number of grid squares worked in Vermont (maximum of 5).
4. If an FT8/FT4 station does not send its grid square, it can count for QSO credit, but not for grid square credit.
5. Digital contacts on modes not using grid squares (RTTY & PSK-31) will use states and countries as multipliers. Other stations must send their state or province to count for credit.
6. FT8/FT4 contacts can be made on the recognized FT8 frequencies of 10.136/10.140, 18.110/18.104 and 24.920/24.919 MHz upper side band. No other modes are allowed on 30, 17 and 12 meters.
7. A Cabrillo log of FT8/FT4 contacts must be submitted. An ADIF file is NOT acceptable. The FT8/FT4 log can be submitted separately from other modes, or combined. QSO’s not in proper Cabrillo format will not be scored! The WSJTx software will output an ADIF file and a generic log file. You will have to find a method to convert the ADIF file to Cabrillo or indirectly log the FT8/FT4 contacts into logging software.
http://www.ranv.org/vtqso.html
This was noted in the latest Contest Update newsletter but may be worth repeating since it’s yet another way for FTx to kill ham radio. :-)
What do you think, ready for 30 meters to become the digital playground for contests?
My question is what happened to the “gentlemen’s agreement” to leave the WARC band contest-free? I’ve emailed the officers of the Radio Amateurs of Northern Vermont and will post their replies here when I get them.
Here are the email addresses of the club’s contacts if you’d like to do the same:
President: | Bob KB1FRW |
VP/Treasurer: | Jim KE1AZ |
Secretary: | Duane WL7CVD |
Editor: | George KC1JGM |
Webmaster: | Mitch W1SJ |