[popped]

FT8 is amazing and would be an amazing way to suck people on HN in. It's fun without transmitting. I'm at the bottom of New Zealand and get transmissions from all over the world including our antipode, Europe. And that's with a crappy short wave receiver with a tiny built in antenna that you can get for <$100.

The fact that someone made the FT8 modulation scheme up out or the blue and people started adopting it and using it and having fun shows the spirit of ham radio.

I bet there are folk on here who would be able to come up with some interesting new modulation schemes to push the envelope even further.

It's a shame that the venn diagram intersection between the modern tech world and ham radio isn't larger.

[amatecha]

Yeah I've had WSJT-X (or JTDX) listening here in western Canada and I've picked up FT8 messages from New Zealand, Japan, Russia, Brazil... it's crazy! I just used a random piece of wire laying around on my balcony! So cool :D

[hanoz]

If anyone fancies having a play with FT8 without any ham equipment, I was surprised to find I could do so using a regular "world band" shortwave receiver. It does need to have SSB (single sideband) mode, I'm not sure how common that is.

Just tune in to 14.074Mhz and listen for the strangely melodic modem-like tones. Download WSJT-X and pipe one into the other.

It was at this point I was annoyed to find my new PC doesn't have a mic socket (what's that all about?), but in fact holding my usb webcam up to the radio's loudspeaker was enough to get reports from all over the continent appearing.