On 6/7/2025 10:26 AM, Joseph Taylor via wsjt-devel wrote:
I've been a ham for more than seventy years.
This August marks my 70th anniversary as a ham. I was active on the HF bands to experience SSB taking over from AM, and all of the antipathy that ensued. I switched when I was out of school and could afford a SSB rig. I started actively using FSK441 on VHF in 2011, JT65 on both VHF and HF that same year, and on HF, using W6CQZ's multi-decoder. My first ISCAT and JT9 QSOs were in 2014, MSK144 since 2017.
I'm well aware of the many
changes taking place on our bands over this time. Sensible band planning is important, and by all means you should devise and promote improved plans if you have good ideas addressing and accommodating the many competing interests.
Once established, band plans can take decades to change. That's one of many things I've paid attention to over the years. I raised the issue on this and the WSJT-X lists at least five years ago, and I raised the FT4 40M issue when it was still beta, but nothing changed.
Radio waves don't recognize national or even continental boundaries, so band plans must be workable on a world-wide basis.
I'm quite aware of all of that, both in my professional life, as part of architectural design teams that included a dozen disciplines; as a member of the Standards Committee of the Audio Engineering Society for 35 years, member of six Working Groups, Vice-Chair of the Working Group on EMC, and a principal author of a half-dozen Standards; and as a member of ARRL's Contest Advisory Committee. All of these are collaborative activities.
Joe, I have great respect for you and the team that has developed your software, and have long advocated for and promoted its use. But you're still missing the major point of my criticism, which is that coordination of these digital watering holes was done WITHOUT adequate coordination, both internationally AND with significant input from existing users of the spectrum in question. And that your team has been completely deaf when announcing new versions of software, about doing anything to correct those early bad calls.
73, Jim K9YC _______________________________________________ wsjt-devel mailing list wsjt-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wsjt-devel
