#FT8 digimode again

20m waterfall FT8

Well it has been a while ago I wrote one of the first user blogposts on the internet about the new digimode FT8. Since that day this post has been read about 5000 times. Not only it seems to be a successful post but I got many e-mails as well with questions. It seems to be they think I know all about it ;-) Well, I've not been a lot on FT8 actually and I only updated to RC2 version of WSJT-X this evening. Other things kept my mind and this evening I was not able to transmit only receive. The problem is that the solar powered battery I use to power my autotuner is at the end of his lifetime and it died actually. But still I was able to do a 20 minute receive session from 160-15m. I was astonished about the amount of stations on all bands with propagation here. It is difficult to find a clear spot on the waterfall as you can see in the screenshot above. This was the result after 20 minutes switching between bands:

Results 160-15m. Click for bigger picture.

Even Australia on 80 and 30m was no problem to receive with -21dB. I really don't know how propagation is these days as I don't listen much HF these days. But this result gives me a wow factor. At the moment FT8 seems to be very good for a quick personal propagation research. Take about 4-5 minutes to receive per band and you know what is possible...