For some time now we have been at the bottom of a solar cycle, meaning ham band activity is sparse on good days, and nowhere to be found on all other days.  Radio operators trying to score DXCC or Worked All States have quite a challenge under these conditions.  If poor band conditions are coupled with the limit of a 100-watt transmitter and a 35' high wire antenna, trying to make contacts can be frustrating beyond frustrating at times.

Short of buying a legal limit amplifier and putting up a 150' tower loaded with various beams, what's a ham to do?

The short answer is, try digital radio.

10 watts and a simple wire antenna can make contacts worldwide, not just when all the conditions are right, but even when the conditions are sub-par.  No, digital is not the ham radio version of medicine show snake oil, but it's pretty much a cure for bad SSB conditions.  Have doubts?  Have a look at the map below.

See all those purple blobs (those upside-down raindrops) on the left?  Those are amateur radio stations in the USA and Central America listening to FT-8 digital signals.  See the blobs on the right?  Those are stations active in Europe at the moment.  At the time I took that screenshot, there were 1,005 active stations transmitting in FT-8 around the world.  Actually there are many more than that, these are just the ones that bother reporting their activity to a website called www.pskreporter.info.   The full map shows stations active in China, Australia, Mongolia, Alaska, and many other places. There's a station active on the southern tip of South Africa, almost 7,000 miles away.

Still don't see the value of digital radio?  Okay, let's look at another version of the map above, this time showing ham stations that have heard me, AG5ND, in Starkville, MS at 8:30 PM Central.  This is the same map as above, but each of the little balloons you see on the map is a marker noting where a station heard my CQ signal, as well as how long ago it was heard.  Ready?  Take a look.

As you can see, between two minutes and six minutes ago a whole lot of stations heard my FT8 signal.  The US map and the map of Europe are completely covered by the time stamps.  At the moment I'm running 40 watts into a G5RV inverted-V antenna with the center about 35' off the ground.  Yesterday I made 41 FT8 contacts, logged them on QRZ and LOTW, and a good many of those contacts have already confirmed my report.

If you'd like to take a look at digital activity yourself, just go to https://www.pskreporter.info/pskmap.html and have a look.  There is a one-line search filter at the top, where you can select which digital mode you want to see, and specify the time frame for the reports shown on the map (time filters run from 15 minutes to 24 hours).  Now that you can see who is hearing me, let's look at who I am hearing on my end.

Here is a screenshot of the digital software I am using.  The string of station activity you see is what my radio is hearing, and what my computer is decoding.

First, note that the left-most column is UTC of the activity heard.  This string of activity started at 2:23:30, and stops at 2:24:00.  All of this happened in only 30 seconds.  The colored lines are stations calling CQ.  The white lines are traffic between two stations. In 30 seconds, in addition to the US stations calling CQ, there were stations from Brazil, Italy, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Cuba.  All you have to do to answer one of these stations is double-click on the colored line, and the software takes over to make the contact.

Yes, the software takes over. The FT-8 digital mode is pretty impersonal.  The entire QSO may take only 90 seconds if things go right.   Each station makes a greeting, a signal report, and an adios.  Each transmission is exactly 15 seconds long.  FT-8 does not support rag-chewing, it's strictly a wham-bam-thank-you-ham digital mode.  But, take heart.  There are many other digital modes where rag chews are not only supported, they are expected.  PSK-31 is such a mode, and if you can do FT-8, PSK-31 should be relatively simple.

It all sounds pretty simple, and it is... sort of.  Before you can make digital contacts, though, there are a number of hurdles one must overcome.  (Insert disclaimer:  I am not an expert on digital radio.  I'm not.  Not even.)  But, I've gotten it to work recently, and since all the little pitfalls are still fresh on my mind, this is probably the right time for me to detail what I learned in the process of going digital.

If this sounds interesting, then stay tuned for the next chapter, where I'll start describing the things you need to do to prepare for digital.  Almost all of these things are free, and the little expense there is is nominal, even for a fixed income.

Until the next chapter, 73, AG5ND, Allen.