It's Tuesday early morning and I am greeting my first cup of java along with some radio time. I found myself drifting off to the weekend of radio operating. I very much enjoyed the Islands on the air contest (IOTA). It was also my plan to get K7K from Kiska island in the log as well. As the saying goes "sometimes things do not work out as planned".
I was keeping an eye on the DX clusters to see when K7K was on air and where. This year is my "year of CW" so I was looking forward to getting them in the log using CW. Again sometimes things don't work out as planned. I noticed once K7K was up and running that FT8 seemed to be their mode of choice for most of the time. I was reading on the cluster posts there were some upset ops... that very little time was spent on SSB or CW.
I am not here to rag on FT8 and to be honest, I used this mode a great deal last year and very much enjoyed it. But having said that in my humble opinion they operated FT8 about 70-80 percent of the time and left modes such as SSB and CW alone.
In the expeditions, defence conditions for them could not have been great and the Digi mode FT8 would sure fill their logs up and better than a poor showing in the log book. Also maybe the tide is shifting and with the Dx Peditions to come FT8 and other Digi modes may be the choice of the operators.
I did notice K7K on their website indicated FT8 would be used but they also included CW and SSB.
There was an occasion CW and SSB were used but on a limited basis. I will chime in and say the only long period of time they used CW was in the IOTA contest. They are indeed an island and rare as well, it was expected for them to take part BUT this seemed to be the only time K7K used CW.
I checked the clusters during the contest to see where they were. I did notice comments of frustration, K7K was operating split and some contest ops were calling on K7K calling frequency. Other comments indicated stations calling CQ contests in the responding TX frequency. Then I found they went back to FT8 in a very short time during the contest.
This is just my humble blog opinion regarding the K7K "event" but when you indicate CW, SSB and FT8 on your site giving equal time to all would be a positive thing. From what I read in the cluster comments there were more than a few unhappy campers.
4 comments:
Hi Mike, I understand your point of view. I've also liked CW since 1976. But I have experimented a lot with digi modes since 2008. But always has a longing for the past. But, as you know, I'm in on that too. Most hams are using FT8 as their favorite mode. I always start with CW in the morning and listen out for the QRP frequencies, but sometimes there is nothing to do with CW, and then I switch to FT8. Have a nice day and I hope you can work K7K soon with CW. 73 Paul
Good morning Paul very nice to hear from you, yes for sure the FT8 section of the bands are very busy! The K7K group have headed home now as it was only a temporary operation from the island. I can understand the liking of FT8, it's like the solar cycle has peaked and making contacts is fairly easy.
73 and have a good week,
Mike
VE9KK
Hello Mike, I share your point of view. But indeed we live in a different time now. I understand DXpeditions like K7K and others. There is simply less stations to work on the classic modes and a lot more on FT8. We very rarely hear Alaska on the bands btw. And if we do the signals always have that distinctive fast QSB on it. Well Mike, I made this comment with Name/URL option. The google option is not working but doesn't matter really. 73, Bas
Good evening Bas and very nice to hear from you, yes it's very true that there are fewer traditional mode operators. They sure can bang off lots of contacts with FT8 as well. Oh and a funny thing I went to answer your comment just now and I was not able to enter a comment. I went into the settings and changed it to pop up. Not sure why that happened as I did nothing...but that is how computers and the internet works sometimes.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
Post a Comment