I spent all morning calling T88WA on 160CW FT8. They responded to my
call twice in a row in the wee hours of the morning when their signal
strength was modest (~R -15), but I never saw the "RR73", message so I
kept trying to work them for hours until the sun came up. In the lead up
to sunrise they became very loud for quite a while (something like R
+1), so I was kind of dumbfounded that they never responded again while
stations with whom I am normally competitive were getting through. I was
beginning to think that something was wrong with my antenna, that
perhaps copper thieves had made off with all my ground radials. I walked
outside after sunrise to make sure they were still there. This
afternoon, I checked the coax loss and it was reasonable (~0.5dB). What
the heck?
After all the aforementioned head scratching, I discovered this
afternoon much to my surprise that I am in the log. They were splitting
streams, so all I can figure is that they sent the RR73 in a split
stream and it was too weak for me to decode; and then they just ignored
me afterwards because they considered me a dupe. I would have been quite
happy to have avoided all those extra hours of calling and gone to bed
instead had I know I was in the log. My experience with FT8 is pretty
limited. Is this a common problem?
73, Mike W4EF....................
On 11/7/2022 12:18 PM, Wes wrote:
IMHO, that's a bug.
On 11/6/2022 7:53 PM, Chortek, Robert L. wrote:
That’s standard F/H.
If they put your call in the queue, and your transmission times out
(or you quit calling), the software activates your transmitter. In
effect you had already worked him (you just didn’t know it yet) - not
really but sort of.
73,
Bob/AA6VB
Robert L. Chortek
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