Ft8 on ham radio deluxe setup code#
A skilled operator can pull a Morse code signal out of noise that you would swear is just noise. For a variety of reasons, Morse code will get through when there isn’t enough power, antennas, or propagation to send voice communications. One historical answer to this problem was to quit talking and start using Morse code. The bands are bad, and your small hidden antenna is not very good at any band that might work. So the number of hams who can even put up a tribander or any sort of visible antenna has dropped significantly. People living in apartments or condos have the same kind of problem. Worse still, the last few decades have seen an increasing hostility to ham radio antennas with city governments, home owner’s associations, and similar. So when propagation is bad you should go to lower frequencies, but that means larger antennas. At 80 meters, mechanically rotating directional antennas are all but unheard of. A very few would have something for 40 meters - despite Mosley’s description of its 40-20-15 antenna as “vest pocket”, but that was pretty exotic. Many hams had directional antennas for the 20, 15, and 10 meter bands (all-in-one antennas called tribanders). At 10 meters, though, the size is quite manageable. You can shorten them a little using some tricks but you pay a price for that in performance. So at 20 meters, the elements are about 10 meters in size. The problem is, the antenna elements are typically about a half wavelength in size. Being able to swing an antenna at a particular direction brings more power to bear on the receiver and also helps you receive the other station. Lower frequencies might get through, but those require much larger antennas and that causes another problem.Īt the height of classic ham radio, every ham wanted a beam antenna or a cubical quad or some other type of rotating directional antenna. With low sunspot activity, higher frequencies don’t propagate well at all. I’ve often thought that if Marconi and the others had started experimenting with radio during a sunspot low, they might have decided radio wasn’t very practical. Right now we are in a deep low part of the cycle and even the last few peaks have not been very good and no one knows why. First, HF propagation largely depends on sunspots and sunspots tend to ebb and peak on an 11-year cycle. That kind of ham radio is suffering right now for a few reasons. Ham radio covers a lot of ground, but “traditional” ham radio is operating a station on the HF bands - 3.5 MHz to 30 MHz - and talking to people all over the world. I can remember as a teenager making a phone call from my car and everyone was amazed. The hobby has changed a lot over the years.
I’ve been a ham radio operator since 1977. Oddly enough, our story starts with the strange lack of sunspots that we’ve been experiencing lately. But if you are still here, let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in ham radio right now and how it relates to the FT8 question. If you already have an opinion, you have probably already raced down to the comments to share your thoughts. I’ll be honest, I think what we are seeing is a transformation of ham radio and like most transformations, it is probably both killing parts of ham radio and saving others. But ham operator has an excellent blog post about how he thinks FT8 is going to save ham radio instead. Is FT8, a new digital technology, poised to kill off ham radio? The community seems evenly divided. In an online poll, 52% of people responding says FT8 is damaging ham radio. Jan F.It is popular to blame new technology for killing things.chris on A low cost 600 watt ultra-linear amplifier.This Blog is mainly dedicated to Amateur Radio (Ham radio) and contains external articles and personal esperiences. IT System Engineer, recently started having fun with morse code and Raspberry Pi Licensed Amateur Radio operator in 1996 as IW5EDI, active member of ARI Firenze and ARRLĬlass 1970, married with two childrens, love experimenting and antenna home-brewing.
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