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?\u00a0The community seems evenly divided.\u00a0In an online poll, 52% of people responding says FT8 is damaging ham radio.\u00a0 But ham operator [K5SDR] has an excellent blog post<\/a> about how he thinks FT8 is going to save ham radio instead.<\/p>\n If you already have an opinion, you have probably already raced down to the comments to share your thoughts.\u00a0I\u2019ll 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\u2019s talk a little bit about what\u2019s 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\u2019ve been experiencing lately.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve been a ham radio operator since 1977. The hobby has changed a lot over the years. I can remember as a teenager making a phone call from my car and everyone was amazed. Ham radio covers a lot of ground, but \u201ctraditional\u201d ham radio is operating a station on the HF bands \u2014 3.5 MHz to 30 MHz \u2014 and talking to people all over the world. That kind of ham radio is suffering right now for a few reasons. First, HF propagation largely depends on sunspots and sunspots tend to ebb and peak on an 11-year cycle<\/a>. Right now we are in a deep low part of the cycle and even the last few peaks have not been very good<\/a>\u00a0and no one knows why.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve often thought that if Marconi and the others had started experimenting with radio during a sunspot low, they might have decided radio wasn\u2019t very practical. With low sunspot activity, higher frequencies don\u2019t propagate well at all. Lower frequencies might get through, but those require much larger antennas and that causes another problem.<\/p>\n So when propagation is bad you should go to lower frequencies, but that means larger antennas. Worse still, the last few decades have seen an increasing hostility to ham radio antennas with city governments, home owner\u2019s associations, and similar. People living in apartments or condos have the same kind of problem. So the number of hams who can even put up a tribander or any sort of visible antenna has dropped significantly.<\/p>\n So here you are with your radio. The bands are bad, and your small hidden antenna is not very good at any band that might work. What do you do?<\/p>\n Some hams have always experimented with digital operation, mostly with war-surplus teletype machines. Sending data digitally is almost as good as sending Morse code and it is easy to type and read a printout compared to manually sending and receiving code. Sure, computers can read code, but since a human is sending it, it is likely to not be perfect copy unless the software is very smart and can adjust to slight variations like a human operator can.<\/p>\n Then came a digital mode called PSK31. It was a low-bandwidth slow digital protocol that used a computer\u2019s soundcard to both send and receive. The computer could pull data out of what you would swear was nothing. There was some error correcting and other technical features that made PSK31 possibly better than Morse code for disadvantaged operations even by very skilled operators.<\/p>\n There are other similar digital modes, but most of them have not really caught on in the way that PSK31 has. Until FT8.<\/p>\n However, because the information is digital and of limited format, a typical exchange is that one operation calls CQ. Another operator notices and clicks on the first station in their display. Now their computers exchange basic information like location and signal strength. And then the contact is done.<\/p>\n If your goal is to \u201cwork\u201d a lot of countries, or states, or islands, or any of the other entities hams try to get awards for, then this is great. It favors getting the minimum data through under the worst conditions. If you want to use ham radio to learn about other people and cultures, this doesn\u2019t help because you just can\u2019t say all that much. The truth is, though, that having long casual conversations with people very far away doesn\u2019t happen as much as you\u2019d think anyway.<\/p>\n [K5SDR\u2019s] point, though, is that right now HF ham radio is on the brink of disaster even without FT8. The bands are bad and with antennas restricted, there isn\u2019t much to do for a lot of hams. FT8 lets them get on the air. Purists complain it doesn\u2019t take skill. But honestly, we\u2019ve heard that before. Automated Morse code gear didn\u2019t ruin ham radio. Nor did the availability of store-bought equipment.<\/p>\n Besides, this is all classic ham radio. There\u2019s plenty of other things to do: emergency preparedness, radio control, propagation experimentation, and TV or image transmissions, just to name a few. If those don\u2019t excite you, there\u2019s moonbounce and satellites (even one orbiting the moon<\/a>), so there\u2019s always something to get involved with. The frontier is moving, and ham radio is moving with it, or at least maybe it should be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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?\u00a0The community seems evenly divided.\u00a0In an online poll, 52% of people responding says FT8 is damaging ham radio.\u00a0 But \u2026<\/p>\nClassic Ham Radio<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>At the height of classic ham radio, every ham wanted a beam antenna or a cubical quad or some other type of rotating directional antenna. 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. The problem is, the antenna elements are typically about a half wavelength in size. So at 20 meters, the elements are about 10 meters in size. You can shorten them a little using some tricks but you pay a price for that in performance. At 10 meters, though, the size is quite manageable. Many hams had directional antennas for the 20, 15, and 10 meter bands (all-in-one antennas called tribanders). A very few would have something for 40 meters \u2014 despite Mosley\u2019s description of its 40-20-15 antenna as \u201cvest pocket\u201d, but that was pretty exotic. At 80 meters, mechanically rotating directional antennas are all but unheard of.<\/p>\nVoice is Wasteful<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>One historical answer to this problem was to quit talking and start using Morse code. For a variety of reasons, Morse code will get through when there isn\u2019t enough power, antennas, or propagation to send voice communications. A skilled operator can pull a Morse code signal out of noise that you would swear is just noise. But what if you aren\u2019t a skilled operator? Bring in a skilled computer.<\/p>\nSo FT8?<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>FT8 is a digital mode, too. It was specifically created to work well in really bad situations like meteor scatter or moonbounce. To maximize the chances of success, each FT8 packet holds 13 characters and takes 13 seconds to send. The protocol depends on a highly synchronized clock and every minute is divided into 15-second slots. Because of this FT8 contacts are highly structured and short. It\u2019s like Twitter on sleeping pills. You won\u2019t use FT8 to talk about your new motorcycle with your friend in Spain.<\/p>\nThe Good, The Bad\u2026<\/h2>\n
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