For the last week or so, I’ve been running a special event station from home, exclusively using FT8 because it means I could operate my station remotely from my home office. It’s a very simple matter to just click callsigns as they respond to CQ calls, manually hit the ‘log’ button and start the cycle […]
On the 16th April I read the Daily DX as normal and was excited to see that Marion island was going to be activated just a week later. Not that I’d ever heard of Marion island but the post said that “Prince Edward & Marion Is. are listed as #11 in Clublog’s DXCC Most Wanted […]
I’ve never been one for morning TV but quite often, before I go to work in the morning, I’ll switch the wireless on and work a few stations using FT8. This morning I tuned to 17m, pointed the aerial towards Europe and started calling CQ. It took a few shouts before an EA4 (thanks Antonio) […]
In 2017 I set myself a little mini challenge to work 100 DXCC entities on 17m FT8 and when I started, I described FT8 as a new mode. In 2017 it really was a new mode and I wonder who could have predicted back then how big it would become. I reached 100 entities in […]
Anyone who chases DX can’t fail to have noticed that the Jarvis Island DXpedition is now on air and has been for less than 48 hours. I did have a listen yesterday but didn’t hear them anywhere. I set up HamAlert notifications specifically for N5J with the source set as G, GM and GW in […]
Over the weekend I was operating in the World Wide Digi DX contest and I wondered if I could get a screen capture of my TS-890 just as I started transmission. I reached over and as the radio went into transmit, I hit the screen capture button and this is the result. As you can […]
Oh this is going to bring the haters to the fore! Not only is it an 48 hour contest but it’s a 48 hour contest using FT8. Mind you, as it’s FT8, it only takes up a few kHz of the spectrum in an area that’s not used for SSB or CW so it shouldn’t […]
Wow! That’s taken a while. Back in August 2017 I set myself a challenge to work DXCC on 17m using just FT8. At the time, I described it as ‘the new FT8 mode’ and it really was in its infancy back then. I completed that challenge in March 2018 and then quietly set myself another […]
2023 update – This still works with macOS Sonoma and Apple Silicon. I’ve been using Apple computers for many years now and even though I’ve made a couple of previous blog posts about keeping the clock accurate on a Mac, those methods have never really been needed and I posted them as a sort of […]
This weekend was the ARRL RTTY Roundup contest and for the first time, FT8 was allowed. I spent a couple of hours operating just to give away a few points and get some experience using the new version of WSJT-X in contest mode. I’d been working mainly European stations and all of a sudden, I […]
