Congratulations on your achievement! Very impressive.
I need two, SV/A and FR/G, for top of the Honor Roll (mixed). My QRZ,com bio describes my station so I won't repeat it here, except to say that I have never owned a transceiver with two receivers. I'm not discounting the idea that two receives might be more effective in some cases, but I (obviously) don't think they are a requirement for working DX pileups.
Case in point: As I said before I worked both VP8STI and VP8SGI on RTTY. AFAIK, Ned, AA7A was operating both times. I spent two hours calling him on 20m, while trying to figure out his pattern before I figured out that he didn't have one! I confirmed with him in person later that this was the case. He randomly tuned after every contact. I finally went up (from my log) 8 kHz and he found me. Trying to find the last guy worked is pointless sometimes.
Regrettably, I think you are correct about FT8. Even the aforementioned AA7A in a presentation to our DX club discussed this. He has become a big promoter, and I believe worked on DXpedition mode development. He asked, "By a show of hands, how many of you RTTY guys listen to the audio?" I raised my hand. He shook his head and said that one reason that he really liked FT8 as a expedition operator was that he didn't have to listen to it. I won't editorialize further.
Wes N7WS On 3/22/2019 10:41 PM, Peter Dougherty wrote:
I concur. There have been some great RTTY ops at times, but more Dxpeditions had it as an afterthought and it showed in their rates. I've always hated RTTY pileups as a DXer. You need to have two active windows and a lot of luck finding the 599 on the second one, especially in a lidfest where nobody stops sending when the DX calls someone. I'm currently sitting at 329 worked in digital, every one of them was on RTTY (including deleteds; 327 without). Included in there were some truly hellacious pileups 15-30 kHz wide. While I still enjoy the mode for simplex DXing or a simple "up 3", for high-demand DXpeditions I am grudgingly accepting that FT8 F/H is the way of the future, and will make a lot of DXers happy down the line. With Bouvet slated for FT8 as the sole digital mode, I'm hoping somehow to get another 4 more that I still need the old way, then I can hang the diddle up for good. - pjd
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