Enjoying some European contacts using JT65 on 80 metres

I had a little bit of fun on 80 metres tonight using the low power JT65 mode. Having chased some of the special event IARU and YOTA call signs during the day, I found the bands a bit dead this evening and decided to see if anyone was on JT65. To my surprise, 3.576 was quite busy with signals. So I gave it a go.

The above video was made while making a QSO into England during a good run of contacts. I had eight QSOs tonight - which might not sound like much - but every QSO on JT65 takes at least four minutes, so it's not bad. I had contacts into England, The Netherlands, Germany and Austria. All QSOs were made with 14 watts from my transceiver, transmitted into my home brew 80 metre inverted v dipole.

All of the stations that heard my signal on JT65, reported on pskreporter.info.

My small signal was heard all over Europe and even in the United States, as you can see from the above map. One of the great joys of using JT65 is because it's a slow-paced, relaxing mode, you can do something else while making contacts. In this case, I was making a YouTube video! The "live" recording caught me unawares towards the end!

A portion of my log today, showing a lot of IARU and YOTA SES contacts.

A few nice contacts on RTTY

KH2L's SteppIR antenna

For some reason I took a yearning to RTTY last night. I suppose I was a bit bored with all the CW and SSB contacts. I saw KH2L (Guam) spotted on 20m RTTY so decided to see if I could hear him. As soon as I arrived on the frequency I could see that he had a good print on the waterfall. He was working simplex, with a few callers. I gave him a shout, and he came straight back to me. Within moments, I was in the log, and I had a new band slot. I decided to hang around RTTY and see what was on offer.

A short time later I worked W1AW/7, one of the ARRL Centenary stations, operating from Arizona. That was 12m RTTY and I worked him with 30 watts. Then it was over to VY0/VE3VID on 20m RTTY, IOTA NA-174. He was calling "up" but for some reason was also working simplex and that's where I worked him. Before finishing on RTTY I also worked W1AW/8 on 20m RTTY.

Of course I could not resist changing to CW to chase 4S7LXG on 40 metres, where I needed Sri Lanka as a new country. It took me a while. He was very low and working a lot of EU. But it was worth persisting. This miniature dxpedition by a group of German operators is fantastic. They are excellent operators and have given me a number of new bands and slots. I now have 4S from 40m through 10m. Is an 80m QSO out of the question?

Tasmania on 20 metres JT9-1 using just five watts

Last week, having taken a step into the weak signal mode JT65, I followed by taking a look at JT9-1. I had been told by Bas PE4BAS that it uses less bandwidth and as it's a new mode, there's less cramming of signals like you get with JT65 because it's not yet that popular.

A screenshot showing my QSO with VK7BO (The frequency
shown is 40m, but I was in fact on 14.078 at the time!)

So I downloaded WSJT-X (v0.9, r3195), and installed it and, within a short time, my computer was decoding signals out of the noise. On my first night CQing, I worked K0KC, followed swiftly by K1JT (Joe Taylor, the man who wrote the JT-9 software!) using only five watts from the Icom 756PRO.

I will say that both JT65 and JT9-1 are very slow modes. It takes about six minutes to make one QSO. Transmit sessions begin on the minute, and take around 50 seconds, with ten seconds of decoding. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I was thrilled to have the help of Doug EI2CN to show me how it's done.

Tonight, having worked JD1BMH in Ogasawara on 20m RTTY as a new country on digi modes, I couldn't find any other decent DX about the bands, so I launched WSJT-X and left it decoding on 14.078. I worked a UA3 who was putting out a CQ and then I spotted something I didn't expect to see!

CQ VK7BO QE38 (See screenshot above)

So I immediately called him back with VK7BO EI2KC -06 (in fact, I didn't properly finish the QSO with UA3 - I didn't give him 73!). The Tasmanian station gave me EI2KC VK7BO -03 and then we confirmed the QSO. Tasmania on five watts. Not bad at all. I think I will enjoy using this weak signal mode a bit more often !!