On Friday night, I worked AA9AA (palindromic callsign). Then on Saturday, my first two contacts were with AA1LL and AA0RQ (almost AA0RR). So, I guess the AAs have it!
FT8 notes
I think I’m finally getting the hang of working FT8. I’ve certainly been more successful with it lately.One thing I’ve started doing is to close all windows on the computer except for the WSJT program. The theory is that the computer needs all the resources it can muster when decoding FT8 signals.
It’s also a good idea to try to find stations that are in the clear. That is to say, stations that aren’t right up against other stations. I don’t know what your experience has been, but what I’m seeing is that if the signals overlap on the waterfall, WSJT seems to have trouble decoding them.
Another thing I need to remember to do is to turn off RIT. I use RIT all the time when operating CW, but it probably should be off when operating FT8.
Morning operation is different from evening operation. I got on 30m FT8 this morning. This is the first time I’ve tried it in the morning. Since the band wasn’t open yet for DX, there were a lot fewer stations, meaning that they were farther apart. I didn’t work any DX, but made more solid contacts.
My LOTW update
After uploading my log to Logbook of the World this morning, I decided to check my DXCC totals. I’m now up to 159 entities, both mixed and CW. I don’t remember the last time I blogged about this, but I certainly wasn’t up to 159 then. Somehow, in the meantime, I managed to snag a couple more. What a great DXer I am, eh?
Bertie says
Two more tips:
Elevate the priority of the wsjt-x process; how you do this this differs among the OSes, but is possible in all three of them.
More controversially, there is a fork of wsjt-x called jtdx that (among other things) adds multithreaded decoding, thus using all the cores your CPU has available. Some people report getting more decodes with that program.
Admittedly, this is all kind if anecdotal: I don’t know that hard data is available for these tips.
Dan KB6NU says
I hadn’t thought about elevating the priority of the wsjt process. I’ll have to look into how to do that, although I’m just using a cheap PC laptop. I keep thinking about getting something a little more powerful, but am not sure if it would really make a difference.
Dave New, N8SBE says
Working contests, especially DX contests will boost your LOTW countries total quickly.
FT8 notes:
1) Try setting ‘work split (fake it)’ or something to that effect, I don’t have the program in front of me at the moment. It will move your transmit frequency so that your audio tone will fall in the range 1000-2000 Hz, which will will help prevent harmonics of your audio frequencies from being transmitted in your passband. I found that working split (without the fake it) worked great on my K3s, as long as set up the “B” VFO to the same mode as the “A” VFO (on the K3, “DATA A”), before invoking it. “Fake it” just moves the VFO A back and forth between receive and transmit. Plain split uses VFO A to receive and VFO B to transmit, which is ‘normal’ split to most operators.
2) Once you have split (fake or not) working, try setting your receive passband to 4 KHz. It turns out that FT8 works all the way up to 4 KHz, but few folks try it, because their transmit passband won’t let them transmits audio much above 2.8 KHz or so. But, with split turned on, you will see when you go to transmit above 3 KHz in the passband, that your transmit frequency will be shifted up temporarily so that the audio falls in the ‘normal’ transmit passband range.
This all takes a bit of getting used to, but it is critical to running DXpedition mode (which requires split). Read the online help for DXpedition and split modes to see how this all works. It was key for me to work the KH1 DXpedition, because I called them above 3 KHz, I was mostly in the clear, because most all of the other stations were jammed down below 3 KHz. I snagged them on both 17 and 20m, after just a couple of calls.