I thought that the ghost signals were indeed caused by hum or other badly 
adjusted transmitters until I noticed that I also saw them on stations that I 
know have a high level of technical competence and when people reported them on 
me. I always monitor my transmissions and these artefacts are not present on my 
transmissions. I take great care not to radiate a poor signal as do the 
aforementioned stations. There is a mixture of poor quality signals and genuine 
ghost signals which Joe has convinced me must be due to AP scatter. As I said 
before I was surprised not to see any doppler slope on the signals but Joe has 
now explained this.

The fact is that we just have to live with them. Of course when you see 
transmissions which have ghosts 20dB down which are harmonically related to 
local mains frequencies then a quiet friendly word with those stations is a 
good idea.

73

Conrad PA5Y

From: Reino Talarmo <reino.tala...@kolumbus.fi>
Sent: 14 July 2019 06:32
To: 'WSJT software development' <wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [wsjt-devel] signal report RST

Hi All,
There has been many situation, where FT8 signal quality is less than perfect 
due to hum, actually hum related harmonics. In one example hum related 
sidebands were down relative to the intended signal:
Delta frequency, signal strength
-600 = 10 x 60 Hz, -41 dB
-240 = 4 x 60 Hz,  -29 dB
-120 = 2 x 60 Hz,  -24 dB

In some contest we use RST reports assuming that readability is 5, which is 
valid as long as signal is decoded; operator could give a lower value based on 
waterfall, but that’s not reliable). Signal strength value is based on the S/N 
value, which is a good way to report signal strength instead of 599 as used in 
many CW contests. The signal tone is assumed always to be perfect and is 
reported as 9. The above shows how in real life situation unfortunately is not 
always so good.

In the CW Tone quality values are defined a bit differently in various sources, 
but this list gives the idea:
T (cw only)
1 Sixty cycle a.c or less, very rough and broad
2 Very rough a.c., very harsh and broad
3 Rough a.c. tone, rectified but not filtered
4 Rough note, some trace of filtering
5 Filtered rectified a.c. but strongly ripple-modulated
6 Filtered tone, definite trace of ripple modulation
7 Near pure tone, trace of ripple modulation
8 Near perfect tone, slight trace of modulation
9 Perfect tone, no trace of ripple or modulation of any kind

The above example could fall in somewhere between 5 to 8, perhaps close to 6.

I know that that we can live without an actual Tone value reporting, but 
sometimes those hum related sidebands do prevent decoding of other signals and 
it would be nice to have a way to report it to the sender in contests. Perhaps 
Tone report selection in contest mode could be added into the list on least 
important nice features.
(Of course somebody could send me a free text such as ‘OH3MA RST 597’ or ‘OH3MA 
TONE 7’ or ‘OH3MA T 7’)

73, Reino oh3ma
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