After reading a bit about FT8 and watching some Youtube videos, it was attending my local club and them presenting on FT8 that convinvced me to get on the air and try it out. They tuned into 20M, 14.074mhz, and there was a lot of traffic.
What is FT8?
FT8 is very-weak-signal digital transmission mode that transmits very limited communications to establish contacts. A typical contact can take around 1 minute through an automated process. FT8 allows people with less then optimal setups to make contacts around the world. The primary software used is WSJT-X, but there are other implementations, such as SDR-Control which has a version for Mac and IOS.
Gettin an Antenna together.
I don’t have a HF antenna yet so it was time to put together a 1/2 wavelength dipole. I went with using the same band as the club the night before, 20M. The dipole legs were 5M, which I used 16 gauge speaker wire to make. I had made it slightly longer so I can trim to suit. I then cut the end off some SMA coax, RG316, and soldered the speaker wire to it. One dipole legs solderes to the shielding, the other to the core. Below is my first attempt, the soldering is terrible, but it shows how simple it is to make a basic antenna.
The next part was to hang it up and tune it, with the hope of getting it between 1-1.5:1 SWR. To measure this I used a NanoVNA V2. I cut off parts of the end slightly but wasn’t having much success lowering it. It started at 6.9, then when cutting ends off, it went to 4.2 then back up to 5 on the next cut; clearly I had done something wrong. My solution… was to use an imprompto “tuner”. At the meeting the night before, another member had spoke about using a coil as a tuner. So I simply curled the wire and crimped it together.
This suprisingly got the SWR 2.4. Then some rejigging the nots where I hung it across the yard, I got the SWR down to 1.3. The antenna hung about 1.5M off the ground, not the best height, but it should be a start.
The next part was getting it connected to the computer. I wrapped some ferrite connectors around the USB cable for good measure and used a SMA -> PL259 -> S0239 -> BNC so I could connect into the radio. Quite a contraption!
And then we were off. It took a little while before I got familiar with the interface, but then it was straight forward. I got an Australian connection in Perth first and another in NSW. It was once I got the one in Canada, VA3FF, I knew it was working and the potential was there!
