AI6UA

First Time on FT8

Worked FT8 today for the first time – I tried js8call but couldn’t get it working. I worked entirely on 20 meters and made contacts in

• QM09 – Japan
• DN88 – North Dakota, USA
• FN04 – Ontario, CA
• FM19 – Pennsylvania / Maryland, USA
• EM69 – Indiana / Illinois, USA
• DN84 – South Dakota, USA
• DM78 – Colorado, USA
• DM79 – Colorado, USA
• EM16 – Oklahoma, USA
• QM08 – Japan
• EN43 – Wisconsin, USA
• BL01 – Hawai’i, USA

So – two countries (though HI probably counts as one in this regard) and eight states over a period of two and a half hours (with some breaks) using a glorified walkie talkie and some speaker wire strung up on my fence. The average distance for a contact was right around 2,000 miles and the longest was almost 5,000 miles. Radios are freakishly amazing.

Some technical notes

I used my Yaesu FT-817 and a Radio Oasis 20m dipole strung along my fenceline oriented roughly north-south, probably 5 or so feet off the ground. I noticed that I couldn’t make contacts with a signal below about -6dB, though I made one contact at -8 dB. The radiation pattern of a dipole is orthogonal to its orientation, and my Japan contacts were in a fairly western line to my antenna – that’s probably what made it work. I used the Z817 antenna tuner to try to tune to each frequency as I switched, maybe that helped.