QSO Valdemar on S5/PK-037
Hi Roger,
Is the SOTA summit reference somewhere in the exchange?
73 Ed.
No Valdemar did not sent it, but you can write it.
73 Roger
The summit reference is “strongly recomended” rather than mandatory - I think one trick is to write it into the “73” line - perhaps there should be a standard agreed?
73 Ed.
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Yes - the free text macro - I looked at this when I was testing the beta versions of WSJTx but that was some time ago and I forgot the details. I hardly ever use FT8 these days.
There was a long thread on the VK SOTA mailing list as well.
73 Ed.
Thanks Roger for your report! I’m always curious how chasers hear, or in this case, read me.
This was my first FT8 SOTA activation and I learned a lot. Some of them were the things that I already knew but failed to think about them in time.
I read the thread that Roger linked and prepared custom text with my SOTA reference. For some reason it somehow got reset back to regular 73 message at beginning of each QSO. Controlling my RPi with tablet via VNC is fiddly and I was not able to switch between messages quickly enough. Probably I transmitted the reference eventually.
Moral of the story? Next time bring all the stuff that you need, set the radio and SW correctly, and either train using tablet at home or just use (heavy) laptop.
Thanks to all three chasers for the QSO!
73 Valdi
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I did my first FT8 activation a weekend or two ago and also used the macro function. I didn’t bother trying to transmit the peak reference in sequence with everything else, or modify the existing messages. I would just send the reference by itself periodically when calling CQ, and also send it by itself after completing QSOs. Seemed to work well.
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