Today, I stumbled upon a write-up of Joe Taylor, K1JT about developing a version of FT8, intended to be used by DXpeditions. In spite of the fact, that I do not favour FT8, especially because it takes out the lower tier of the signal to noise range, I consider this an interesting and valuable development…. Continue reading »
Last weekend, New Zealand issued permissions on a trial basis to operate on 60 metres. That was very good news, first of all for the ZL ops who had been waiting for this opportunity for a very long time after the WRC-15 results came into force January 2017. It is hoped that this will lead… Continue reading »
FT8 has been around for some time now. It was adopted fast by the amateur radio community and it is clear that FT8 overtook JT65 quickly. But is it an improvement? It has to be said that Franke and Taylor (FT) have done a tremendous job with the development of various weak signal modes and… Continue reading »
Trying to improve reception on 60 metres, many experiments followed, but nothing worked… It reminded me about Catweazle, a wizard in a TV series that ran during the early seventies. Numerous receive antennas were tried, but none of them outperformed my dipole. Close to the dipole were a flag and a resonant loop. The flag… Continue reading »
During the morning of Feb. 23, conditions across the north pole appeared to be good. My JT signals were spotted in Alaska and on Hawaii. WH7AA (Hawaii) and KL7J (Alaska) reported me just after 06:00 UTC. The path to Hawaii crosses the polar region and is prone to absorption. Although the magnetic indices were not… Continue reading »
Currently, I am working on a paper regarding propagation on 60 metres. Transmissions with JT mode were used to collect spots and create datasets. A valuable datasource is wsprnet.org, to which WSPR spots are uploaded and fed to a database. The data can be downloaded. In order to support the study, I developed a WSPR… Continue reading »
One of the latest developments is a parser/analyser for the ALL.TXT files that WSJT-X and JTDX create. The ALL.TXT file contains all sent and received messages and as I wanted to have a tool to retrieve the data in a structured way, I decided to write a parser. It is made in Visual Studio 6…. Continue reading »
I promised to report a comparison between JTDX and WSJT-X. Well, JTDX is the winner. I have been using is for several weeks now and I would not revert to WSJT-X.
In December 2015, I wrote an article with some tips regarding 60 metres. Here is a link to the article: 10 things to know for more success on 60 m I hope it helps you to improve your station.
Today, another good opening to Australia was recorded. During the last month, quite a number of openings occurred, showing that propagation from Europe to Australia is not as rare as I initially thought. In a number of cases, a peak is observed around 19:30 UTC. At that time, in Australia the sun is already above… Continue reading »