[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.