Many people suffer with high local noise on 160m. Even here in a rural village it is close to S9 on SSB.
FT8 can be quite an effective mode as it only needs 50 Hz of bandwidth and works with very weak signals. For this reason, it can be very good with high noise levels as the effective bandwidth is so much narrower than SSB.
As the (free) software effectively creates the 50 Hz bandwidth, narrow filters are not needed in the rig. SSB filters are fine.
WSPR needs even less bandwidth (about 6 Hz) but is not a QSO mode really, and takes nearly 120 seconds to send a message whereas FT8 needs 15 seconds to send a message burst. It take a few minutes to complete a QSO. Contacts are very basic. JT8 supports free form messages, but I have not used this. Most prefer FT8 to WSPR.
No comments:
Post a Comment