HF is Dead! Or is it?

With all the antennas off the CARC tower for servicing and my own modest CobWebb on the ground for re-tuning I thought it would be fun to do some receiving for a change.  Now I like a challenge so I thought I’d try the worst antenna I could fit in my garen, a random length of wire pushed into the back of my FT857 and running behind my PC, through the house wall and in a V from three fence posts in the garden at a height of about 6ft.  I decided to monitor QSOs on a variety of HF bands using JT65.

Now to be clear the antenna isn’t tuned and the radio has S9 of noise on every band thanks to the PC swamping absolutely every other noise source in the locality and I’ve managed to hear a very respectable 87 DXCC from Chile to Australia, even JD1WNH, in Ogasawara which we haven’t worked from the club.  You can see the lastest 24 hours spots here .

For decoding I’m using WSJT-X with the PSK Reporter box checked:

The UDP server boxes are also ticked to allow JTAlert to interact with WSJTX.  This allows WSJTX to interact with my logbook using Log4OM and massively simplifies operating JT65 when you only have a few seconds between decode and the next transmit period to decide whose CQ to reply to.  It check new DXCC and other attributes against your log, whose on LoTW or eQSL as well as the US state that the station is located.  I’m sure it does a whole lot more but I haven’t figured that out yet.

All the software mentioned here is available for free download, no “limited time trials”, no “in app purchases” just full function and free.

Anyway here is the map of the DXCC heard.  I plan to get the CobWebb tuned and back in the air to get some QSOs in the log.