FT8

4 Articles

A Two Metre Bridge Across The Atlantic For The First Time

June 22, 2019 by 22 Comments

Amateur radio is a pursuit with many facets, some of which hold more attention than others for the hacker. Though there have been radio amateurs for a century it still has boundaries that are being tested, and sometimes they come in surprising places.

A recent first involved something you might consider a done deal, a transatlantic radio contact. On June 16th, for the first time ever a contact was made between the operators [D41CV] and [FG8OJ] at 3867 km across the Atlantic ocean from the Cape Verde Islands to Guadeloupe, on the 2 metre (144 MHz) band. If this means little to you it’s worth explaining that the 2 m band is a VHF band, with a range normally similar to that you’d expect from an FM broadcast station. Nobody has ever done this before, so it’s a significantly big deal.

Before you dismiss this as merely some radio amateur chasing grid squares and thus not particularly impressive, it’s worth talking about both the radio mode used and the unusual atmospheric conditions that were carefully sought for the achievement. The attempt was made to coincide with a prediction of transatlantic tropospheric ducting, and the mode employed was [Joe Taylor K1JT]’s FT8. This is a digital mode designed especially for weak-signal and long-distance work. It is theorised that the propagation was so-called surface ducting, in which the signal travels and is reflected between the surface of the sea and a relatively low-level reflective layer of atmosphere. The contact really pushed the limit of what is possible with radio, and while you wouldn’t use it for a voice conversation, proves that there are new tricks in an old hobby for the hardcore experimenter.

We’ve talked about [K1JT] modes crossing the Atlantic before, but of course not at such a high frequency.

Hams Gone Wild: Amateur Radio Field Day 2019

June 19, 2019 by 32 Comments

Of all the images that amateur radio conjures up, the great outdoors doesn’t usually figure heavily. People seem to think hams sit in a dark room at a desk heavy with radio gear, banging out Morse code into late into the night and heedless of the world outside the window. All of which sort of sounds like hard-core gaming, really.

And while that image certainly applies in a lot of cases, hams do like to get out and about at least once a year. That day is upon us with the 2019 Amateur Radio Field Day. Hams across North America reserve the fourth full weekend of each June to tear themselves out of their shacks and get into the world to set up operations in some kind of public venue, generally a park or other green space. Part cookout, part community outreach, and part slumber party – it lasts all weekend and goes around the clock – hams use field day as a chance to show the general public where amateur radio really shines: real-time worldwide communications under austere conditions.

It’s also a chance to get folks excited about getting their license, with many Field Day locations hosting “Get on the Air” stations so that unlicensed folks can try making a contact under the supervision of a licensed operator. Licensed but underequipped hams also get the chance to spin the knobs on someone else’s gear, and maybe line up that first rig purchase. And there are plenty of opportunities to learn about new modes as well, such as FT8 and WSPR. As an example your scribe is looking for some guidance on getting started with APRS, the automated packet reporting system that’s used for things like high-altitude balloon tracking.

If you have any interest at all in learning how to properly operate radio equipment, you owe it to yourself to track down the nearest Field Day location and stop by. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) has a ton of Field Day information, from a map to locate the 1500 Field Day sites to rules for the contests that will be run that weekend to guides for setting up and operating an effective Field Day setup. There will be 40,000 hams out there this year, and they’d all be thrilled if you drop by and ask a few questions.

Continue reading “Hams Gone Wild: Amateur Radio Field Day 2019” →

FT8: Saving Ham Radio Or Killing It?

November 2, 2018 by 151 Comments

It is popular to blame new technology for killing things. The Internet killed newspapers. Video killed the radio star. 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.  But ham operator [K5SDR] has an excellent blog post about how he thinks FT8 is going to save ham radio instead.

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 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. Oddly enough, our story starts with the strange lack of sunspots that we’ve been experiencing lately. Continue reading “FT8: Saving Ham Radio Or Killing It?” →

An Autonomous Drone For Working Rare Squares

March 9, 2018 by 20 Comments

Amateur radio is an extremely broad church when it comes to the numerous different activities that it covers. Most of the stories featuring radio amateurs that we cover here have involved home-made radios, but that represents a surprisingly small subset of licence holders.

One activity that captivates many operators is grid square collecting. The map is divided into grid squares, can you make contact with all of them? Land-based squares in Europe and North America are easy, those in some more sparsely populated regions a little less so, and some squares out in the ocean are nigh-on impossible. As an attempt to solve this problem, the Jupiter Research Foundation Amateur Radio Club have put an HF transceiver and associated electronics in a WaveGlider autonomous seagoing vehicle. The idea is that it will traverse the ocean, and you can work it, thus getting the contact you require to add those rarest of grid squares to your list.

The transceiver in question is a commercial portable one, an Elecraft KX3, and the brain of the payload is a Raspberry PI. It’s operating the FT8 mode, and will respond to a call on 14074 kHz in an automated fashion (Or it would, were its status page not telling us that it is offline due to power issues). It’s currently somewhere in the Pacific ocean, having been at sea now for a couple of months.

We spotted this through a spirited online discussion as to whether working an automated station is really a proper contact at all, with one amateur commenting that it might be a way for him to keep on going post mortem. But the ethics of the contact aside, it’s an extremely interesting project and one we hope eventually will come back online.

Thanks Sotabeams, via [AE5X].