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.