FT8 – Tipping Point for Ham Radio?

As someone who went from nothing -> Amateur Extra when i was 23 (25 now) from a random spurt of inspiration to learn ham radio and then promptly did nothing with the license i agree with this.

I don't know exactly what i was expecting from getting the license but i will say that i didn't expect it to basically just be dominated by old conservative men who don't appreciate younger folk stepping in on their air space. I have yet to actually speak to anyone because i don't feel like there is anything i would want to say.

Part of me was excited to do things like decode ISS transmission or send digital packets around the world; but i wanted to ease into the higher cost HF equipment with a simple and cheap as chips baofeng UHF/VHF radio (i know, its garbage but i like i said i wanted to ease into the hobby) and when i discovered there was nothing to do but listen to old men rant i just shelved the radio.

I considered getting the bitX40 but never ended up doing it because i don't own the house i rent and putting an antenna up seems like a lot of work for a place i might move from soon. Admittedly maybe my problem was getting a baofeng UHF/VHF instead of something that i can plug into my computer and do digital modes with. But no one was really around to help me decide what to choose or give me insight into what i may want to do with my new AE powers.

I'm a regular on HF and I've found the community to be welcoming and I've learned a lot from people with half a lifetime more experience than I have. Retired doctors, aerospace engineers and other interesting fields. There are many younger contesters who move very quickly and just work to make contacts.

Bad actors? There are a handful, but FCC has taken enforcement action against several. https://www.fcc.gov/general/amateur-radio-service-enforcemen...

Weak signal modes have been around for a while. And voice is a different part of the spectrum.

I feel the need to clarify AWildC182's comment because I think it reflects poorly on amateur radio as an inviting place for younger people.

There are some "scenes" in amateur radio that are dominated by older, somewhat conservative leaning discourse. Some VHF and UHF repeaters are like this, and there are many groups of people who chat with the same group every night on 80m SSB.

Some newcomers start out on VHF/UHF repeaters and if they live near one that is like this, it may turn them off to the entire hobby even though it's just a small part of it.

I recommend CW and FT8 as less conversational ways of getting on the air. If you are in the mood for a conversation, you can do so on CW, and there are conversational digital modes.

I personally like contests and experiencing propagation and band openings, but don't really need to have a long chat.

So my recommendation for a new licensee would be to jump right into MSK144 and then determine what to do next :)

I'm in my 50's and I've been a ham for over 30 years. I understand where you are coming from. I do also operate FT8 and have thought to myself at times how nice it was to be making contacts without having to listen to people ranting.

That said, there are plenty of hams who don't want to complain about politics, we just notice the curmudgeons more. I've had some great HF SSB QSO's lately that never touched on politics.

Some of the more technical modes tend to appeal to hams that are more interested in the technical side than the hams that frequent HF SSB or VHF FM.

There are many bands and many modes. If your VFO lands you on a QSO that you don't want to hear, QSY to another and call CQ.

Hilariously true. Nothing worse than hearing “people” on 80m. It’s like a pub night full of racist, sexist old farts. I’m in the UK so this spans Europe as well. It’s not just a US thing.

There’s less trash on 40/20m I find.

I stick to CW, FT8, WSPR. Not enough bandwidth for an opinion :)

On a positive note, nice to see lots of hams in here.

> Not having to talk to an octogenarian about politics.

Nobody "has" to do this on phone. Of course there are people predisposed to this but you don't have to talk to them or you can change the subject. For instance I still enjoy discussing radio stations and usually it's interesting to hear about someone's elaborate construction and what they are doing with it while they are willing to hear how I am getting over the equator and atlantic with no amplifier and a shitty piece of wire.

I absolutely agree. The topics of discussion on HF are mostly conservative politics, joint replacement surgeries, and their wives' behavior.

Digital modes are a godsend.

My grandmother is a ham that is heavily involved in her ham club. Everyone was older, but polite. Of course they have different political views, but they're not a bunch of creeps, although there are some weird hams for sure. I knew one guy in college that was getting a license so the government couldn't listen to him like they could for his phone. I was like "what...you do realize you're basically broadcasting out to the whole city".

It is painful where I live on the typical UHF/VHF bands. And even worse if anybody doesn't lie and say they're using a Kenwood/Yaesu/ICOM and instead makes the enormous mistake of mentioning they're working the repeater with a Baofeng.

So, multi-hop E-skip is a way that the signal can propagate through the ionosphere. (E-layer skip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation). 2200m and 7cm are wavelengths. FT8 is a digital mode that can transmit a very restrictied amount of information -- basically your callsign and where you are. Exchanging this information is enough for a contact, or QSO. The debate is about whether it's still about communication when you can't really talk to people using FT8.

Edit: And contacts are basically how hams keep score. You used to send postcards to the people you'd talked to. Old hams have binders full of them.

FT8 and other weak signal modes can work with more noise and less signal than conventional modes. Which makes possible to communicate with the current poor HF propagation, or with lower power devices and longer distances. It does this by using low bandwidth (50 Hz), low bit rate (6 bit/s), and error correction.

The other special thing about FT8 is that it only does contacts, with binary messages for doing the exchange.

Exactly so, and moreover, during a solar minimum, when HF propagation is sub-par even in OK conditions. The weak-signal stuff is what got me interested in upgrading from tech to general, and then extra. Every new thing over the decades has been met with the same "this is killing ham radio" response.

I'd just like someone to de-jargonize the whole article.

Global communication in amateur radio was previously only been possible using high power transmissions (which requires a full license).

FT8 makes global communication achievable for beginner amateur radio folk.

Some amateur radio practitioners think if you want global communications without learning radio theory, use your ISP or SIM provider.

Ham radio is an incredibly large hobby much like model railroading or warhammer40K or photography or RC aircraft or sex or ... computer programming.

Similar to every other area of human activity thats ever existed and ever will, tiny sub-group Z will always trash talk everyone doing sub-group A thru Y as not enjoying the model railroading hobby the 'correct' way or not using the 'correct' editor/IDE or not doing the correct thing in the bedroom or whatevs.

So its discussing the usual collision of "whoa this new activity (fad?) is becoming super popular outta no where" with the usual "What I've been doing for 50 years is the only correct way to do it"

There's nothing inherently wrong or bad or incorrect about SSB analog voice modulation on wavelengths near 80 meters; but you can't expect life long aficionados of that particular sub-group to be excited about some rapidly growing subgroup they're not interested in. So thats the "FT8 is killing ham radio"

Now as for why any of this matters, the analog HF SSB crowd has cornered the national USA hobby club such that QST magazine etc promotes 80M SSB operation in the USA as being the "only real ham radio" and then the usual political fallout and drama.

Low bitrate modulation of short messages. The messages are signal reports, and a whole two-way contact is literally automated multi-message back-and-forth.

digital messages encoded in a format then transmitted using frequency shift keying for the data to audio. it has 15 sec transmit/receive cycles and due to the error correction involved has very few characters that are actually transmitted.

Isochronous Twitter for ham radio except only 13 characters.

It's great!

There's a variation of FT8, JS8CALL, that allows for text chat and data transmission.

http://js8call.com

Seems to me that, especially for EmComm, this could be a total game changer. Field radio with small antennas, low power requirements, and nearly worldwide reach.

Curious, what about the symbol rate limit limits you from using, say 8PSK or 16QAM? Is it that it also effectively limits channel bandwidth to something that isn't practical to transmit and/or receive with higher order modulation?

What would you like explained? I know the tech doesn't cover a lot regarding HF (which this is largely for). Sunspots? Propagation? Digital modes?

I hope this helps: http://www.arrl.org/ham-radio-glossary

FT8 is a signal encoding mode. My impression is that it is much more robust and therefore also reduces the required skill, luck, etc. in making successful transmissions under unfavorable conditions.

"DX" is an abbreviation for "distance", generally used in the sense of "making long-distance contacts." A "QSO" is a successful contact between stations, and "working" refers to the process of making / attempting to make contacts.

"Multi-hop Es" refers to this atmospheric effect using the E region of the ionosphere: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation

"CW" (for "continuous wave") typically refers to the use of Morse code over a constant frequency wave that's just being turned on and off, which has historically been one of the most robust modes, although it requires skill in encoding/decoding Morse by hand.

"73" means "best regards" or similar; it's from very old telegraphy abbreviations.

What you're looking for to research is WSJT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSJT_%28Amateur_radio_software...

In a nutshell, Joe Taylor (K1JT) created a program that features novel modulation schemes that solve a few problems that other modulations didn't, like fast meteor scatter modes, modes that are better for Earth-Moon-Earth communications, and modes that work better in very low-signal scenarios with a lot of signal fading due to the ionosphere.

The result are modes that are very slow - only sending something like 13 characters every 15 seconds for FT8 - but far more reliable than other keyboard modes like PSK31 or Olivia. The mechanization means QSOs are stripped to their bare necessities - callsign, location, signal report, and that's it. It's shifts the idea of a QSO by forcing quick, scripted, nearly automated contacts, which is a very well-received change since a lot of HF ops are only interested in the contact, and not the person.

Most "modes" like AM/FM and maybe SSB are like physical layer protocols, essentially just modulation schemes. A number of digital modes also maybe fall into this category as well as morse. FT8 is more of an application layer technology. It uses frequency shift key as it's physical layer but also has other abstractions at work like error correction and some session state management. It's not the only mode that could be described this way either, just the most popular right now.

While that may be true of this mode what it has evolved into is JS8CALL[0] which allows for something like IRC over HF (freeform chat).

[0]http://js8call.com

Sort of. The "rules" to establish a contact generally state that you have to exchange some data, but doesn't define "data". Mostly this devolves into a simple piece of data - your grid coordinate is one example. During contests (yes, there are amateur radio contests), a signal report (strength and clarity expressed as 2 digits) would be accepted.

With a low bandwidth mode like this, there is not much possibility of transmitting more than a few bits of data. So a grid square and callsign are about all that will fit.

"Modes" would be much better named as "protocols" (like "Ethernet" or "IP"). Originally it was rudimentary analog protocols: AM, FM, Morse/CW that were decoded with simple circuits where "mode" might have been more appropriate.

I've made exactly one contact with FT8 using a low power radio and crappy antenna. I played the generated tones from tinny computer speakers to the mic, just messing around. Someone responded! (Probably semi-automatically...)

I thought it was pretty cool that it worked at all, but it doesn't seem like a very exciting mode to pass the time other than maybe to fill the log book and impress all my hypothetical friends.

The resiliency might be useful for emergency communications in some way, but it would have to be a peculiar type of emergency.

"Seems kind of pointless"

Its a hobby...

More sunspots are associated with increased solar flux, which cause ionization in the upper atmosphere. HF (3-30MHz) communication is generally enhanced by increased ionization (to a coarse first-order approximation -- the nuances fill many books and are not entirely understood.)

At other frequencies, sunspots may or may not be a good or bad thing, depending on your definition of "good" and "bad".

Simple explanation, sunspots energize the atmosphere making it easier for lower frequency signals to bounce off the upper atmosphere back down to the ground allowing longer range because you're not horizon limited.

DX is a term for a long distance contact. Increased sunspot activity results in increasing ionosphere ionization, resulting in an increase in the refracting power of the ionosphere. Higher refracting power means radio waves can be bent more, resulting in longer distance communication (also, the ionosphere bends lower frequencies better, so you get an increase in the MUF, or Maximum Usable Frequency that will get bent back to the earth.)

Depends on the band and your application. So what the HAM radio operators are doing is bouncing signals off the ionosphere. With more sunspots active, the ionosphere is more electrically charged, making is easier to bounce signals off of.

People have bounced signals off of the ion trails of meteorites, space shuttle reentry, and other absurd stuff :)

> I thought sunspots killed radio communications?

They can. Sunspots can also greatly enhance radio communications. Outside of amateur radio this effect is rarely appreciated; ordinary radio service users usually only become aware of sunspots when they interfere with communication. Amateurs, however, operate on many different frequencies, and they achieve communication under unusual, rapidly changing conditions. They often use solar activity to their advantage.

The story mentions "10m DX." This is ham speak for the 10 meter or 30 megahertz band (the high end of the 3-30 MHz "high frequency" or HF band, which is extremely low frequency by today's standards) long range (DX; multiple "hop", frequently international) communication. Using traditional modes the 10 meter band is presently "closed" to long distance communication, meaning you get nothing but static when you listen and no one detects your transmissions. The lack of solar activity is the reason the band is closed. When solar activity is high (lots of sunspots) one can use a low cost transceiver, a small antenna and an easily obtained license and reach people thousands of miles away.

Yes. Make sure you are using direct sampling, attach a long wire, string it up. Use an audio pipe to pipe the audio from your SDR software into the WSJT-X software, which also lists the default frequencies for a given mode. Enjoy!

FT8Call has been renamed to JS8Call (and also mentioned upthread).

From the balance of comments on this article you'd think FT8 was saving ham radio from itself. /death of ham radio predicted, film at 11