On 9/7/2024 3:55 AM, Hans Hjelmström wrote:
Same here .Just lost most of the fun with the new stuff FT 8 and in my
opinion,even worse
RIB and remote operating like N5J and others.
I view AA7JV's Radio In a Box as the greatest and most innovative
engineering achievement in ham radio in my 69 years as a ham. It
increases the likelihood of a team getting permission to activate
islands that are a wildlife refuse, greatly reduces the difficulty of
setting up decent stations on islands with difficult topgraphy, and
greatly reduces the cost of expeditions by eliminating the need to set
up an encampment of two dozen hams on an island or in an entity, to
transport them there, and to maintain their human needs there for two
weeks.
Those of us without heads in the sand may have noticed that ham radio
has been graying out for decades, as many of us old-timers are dying
out, AND WE ARE NOT BEING REPLACED in like numbers. An important
innovation of the N5J operation was to involve both OT ops and new hams
as remote operators.
The ONLY impact of these innovations on those of us at home has been
that reduction of cost and difficulty of putting all those radios on the
island, and to get them permission to be there. It has ZERO impact on
our end of the QSO. There are radios and antennas on both end of the
QSO, and a human operator is in control on both ends. The difference is
that the human operators didn't all need to travel to the island -- only
the much smaller team that set up and maintained the gear, which some of
them built!
AA7JV introduced another important innovation at the Visalia DX
Convention in 2019 that is quite important to we Topband OTs. Observing
that in his many DX trips, propagation allowed nearly all of the most
difficult QSOs on one or two nights of a 2-3 week trip, George developed
a sophisticated combining network that allowed the two best weak signal
modes, CW and FT8, to operate simultaneously into the same TX antenna,
and to use the same weak signal RX antennas, allowing them to be active
all night every night! The magnitude of this achievement technically is
to realize that the two modes are working within 20 kHz of each other,
and listening within 10 kHz, and the CW station is running high power!
George Wallner, AA7JV, is one of my heroes!
73, Jim K9YC
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