So true - everyday an adventure!
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It’s a strange game sometimes. I can see that, from an activator’s point of view, using either FT* mode has advantages for adding unique callsigns for the Challenge, but they need to go where the activity is, and if FT4 is empty and FT8 is busy…
I also suspect that for an activator it may be more effective to pick and chase callers rather than calling CQ, but that does make chasing FT* activations trickier for a SOTA chaser.
I have random opportunities for chasing, and when I’ve got the rig on I’ll look at the spots and pick the likely suspects first. Usually I’ll pick the CW spots ahead of other modes, but for the 10 metre challenge I have been giving all the accessible modes a try. On balance, I’ve found the FT* modes a bust. If I can find the activator calling on the mode concerned (and I’ve tried chasing FT8 and FT4 activators) I’ll try answering, but around zero of them have come back to me recently, so it hasn’t really been worth the time. Calling SSB and CW activators has been far more rewarding.
(At the moment all digital modes are offline for me, as my shack desktop has died and the laptop I’m using instead doesn’t have the capacity to handle the digital game, but that’s by the by.)
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Continuing the digression …
Interesting. I haven’t seen a drop off of 30m contacts from April. I activate mid morning to mid afternoon on weekdays. Because (at my age) I get cold quickly sitting around on summits I work through chasers and call CQ once or twice and - if no reply - then QSY or go home. Looking at my numbers I see variations from one activation to the next but nothing on a seasonal timescale. I’m getting more than the minimum 4 every time to qualify the activation based on 30m contacts alone, hence my comment about the consistency of my favourite HF band.
Oct: 6 8
Nov: 22
Dec: 7
Jan: 6
Feb: 20 13 14 12
Apr: 20 12
Jun: 6 7
I could go back over previous years to show similar results but I think the point is made.
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“Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”
Yogi Berra
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Hi Rick,
Perhaps the failure to make an FT* contact is time synchronisation? (perhaps you know this - so sorry if I am stating the obvious but I keep hearing of it happening). If the time on your computer is only minutely off the digital modes that need synchronisation (such as FT*) simply don’t connect (although they can receive). If you add a time monitoring and clock updating program to your computer that talks to an Internet based NNTP time server, that would address this problem - if you don’t already have this happening.
73 Ed.
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FT8? seems to me that the future of the hobby will be in jeopardy: where is the human contact? … the interaction? …how can you make a ''contact" if you are doing something else at the same time?
This is soulless and surely folk will tire? A bit like ‘yoof’ with their faces down gazing at a screen on their smart phones and the social skills soon go!
Get out there and talk/speak/paddle/ straight key and put some of the human back into so -called ‘contacts’
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Many of us do, but I also enjoy working SOTA Stations and DX on FT Modes John @M6KET. Using all modes is good, we shouldn’t be partisan though. Showing here my last 2.5 years mode activity percentages from Clublog:
73 Phil G4OBK
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I am active on 10m a lot because of the 10m challenge - and my activations often last for many hours. At the beginning of my activation I spot myself and call on 10m CQ in CW (… and also SSB). I check the RBN and find out the conditions…
I am often spotted by many countries with good signals, but I call in vain. When I then tune the band, I hear a lot of activity on the frequencies for data mode. Nothing on CW and nothing on SSB.
If you look at the QSOs of the participants in the 10m challenge (e.g. F4IVI), you are very successful with FT8. I think I could have at least doubled the number of my unique contacts during the time I was at the summits if I had used data mode. (…and all this while I drink coffee and eat cake and talk to other people 
)
But as has already been written here, … it is too soulless for me too. Not my style.
73 Armin
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Are you a Daily Mail reader?
FT-8 and other such weak signal modes are at the cutting edge of the hobby. Getting them working from a mountain top is a worthwhile challenge.
Personally, making an FT-8 contact from a frozen GM summit to VE using a QRP labs QDX, raspberry pi and phone (as display and GPS locked clock) was a highlight for me. Felt like a real achievement.
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What an insult! 
With regard to the initial question; I doubt that you could be on both FT4 and FT8 at the same time, so the operator has to pick one, and seeing more activity on FT8 he would probably pick that one to maximise his chances of contacts. Its a self-perpetuating bias in favour of the older and more established mode…much like the bias in favour of CW over SSB!
I agree, strangely enough! OTOH SOTA is already replete with challenges: getting to the foot of your summit, climbing it in often inhospitable conditions, setting up a station and attracting chasers is enough for many. If you can cope with an extra layer of challenge, more strength to your arm! 
What attracted me to ham radio, over six decades ago, was hearing the voices of ordinary people operating their own stations and talking to other ordinary people around the world. I still get a buzz from it even now. I flirted with ATV on UHF, with SSTV on VHF and HF, and with PSK31 (remember that? ) and even got myself up to a reasonable speed on CW, but these and the thought of modern data modes lacks flavour for me so I stick to my trusty mic! I applaud the ingenuity of the FTs, but am not tempted. I don’t resent those who are, there is room for all!
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I know I’ve been too long out of the country when I read something like that and I have no idea of how to parse it. Too much water under the bridge, too many internet memes that come and go, too many social networks taking our time and attention. Note to myself: “Whatever: let it go…”
I remember back in 2007/8, just a year or so after getting my license, getting the then brand new JT-65 HF (I think that was the name) running with a PC and learning to get some kind of a timer-refresh service running. It was all very exciting — for a while, and then it just palled. Too much screen-watching while a program did the stuff for you. FT4 and FT8 aren’t exactly new, or cutting edge, they’re just a whizz-bang paint-job over the older JT stuff.
I’m sure it was, at that time. But I’m curious - how did the VE station feel about the contact? Don’t be shy, tell all…
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Not sure where you’re going with this Rob but I don’t see how it’s any different from a DX SSB contact from a summit. All I know is I’m freezing my butt off on a mountain top calling into a QRP radio attached to a bit of wire. The guy at the other end could be sitting in his cosy shack sipping a brandy whilst talking to me on a £5k radio, £3k amp and monoband beam up a 100’ tower. I’ll never know how he feels either.
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I use NTP to regulate the clocks on my local machines (even the Raspberry Pi ones), and I can make (or could when the desktop was still working) other FT* contacts easily enough, so I think my end was OK. The main problem I have with chasing on the FT* modes has been finding the activators in the first place, and obviously, especially with ten metres, propagation has a part to play in this, but if you can’t find them you can’t even try to work them. Of course it’d be easier for chasers if activators used a less crazy-busy band segment, but I can see why an activator would choose the busier segment first. However, doing so inevitably makes them more difficult for a chaser to find (unless, of course, they lock their TX frequency and put the exact frequency in their spot, but very few activators do this).
On balance, I find the chase more enjoyable and rewarding on non-digital modes, and I prefer chasing on the less pile-up-prone bands for very similar reasons.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell, but I do remember hearing the excitement in a caller’s voice when we completed an SSB contact between Canada and Kenya with me running full power (all 5 watts of it) from my FT817ND into a dipole strung between a couple of trees in my mother’s garden in Nairobi back in 2011, just after I got my M0 call. It was the first time I’d worked Canada, and the best DX of my holiday.
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I don’t know how many activations you have on your shoulders. How many times did your fingers go numb trying to operate properly on CW during winters. Or the magic you must have done trying not to fail on CW when the bugs drive you crazy during the summer.
Do you think SSB and CW are the most “Human” modes? In most QSOs during an activation (cold, heat, rain, snow, insects… and why not a bear or wild boar watching you) they are limited to a ¨FIVE NINE¨ or ¨599¨ and the truth is that I don’t see a lot of “Human” in this.
Me being a 99% CW guy, I confess that I never liked SSB and DATA. But this year I first decided to give the SSB a try and luckily I was pleasantly surprised.
But since the “Humans” of the SSB and CW have been conspicuous by their absence for a long time, I decided to give another mode that I didn’t like a chance. I started with FT8 and personally I found it very entertaining.
It may be useful to you:
You know that to get the points for an activation you must contact 4 different stations, right? Well, in my last activation it was impossible for me to adjust the antenna to 7mhz, which is where I make QSOs without problems.
I went to 28mhz and called unsuccessfully on both CW and SSB (beacons were healthy and strong) with no answers. I tried my luck on FT8 and the ones that came out are the ones that saved my activation.
In short, this old CW guy appreciates the “Humanity” of the FT8 operators who, if it weren’t for them, the bands would be 100% empty and I would have returned home without the activation points.
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It’s not a personal slight at all, Fraser, don’t worry about that, I hold you in high regard. My concern with these FT* modes is the impersonal quality of the QSOs, as compared with other modes; even PSK (que?) was a conversational mode, albeit by using a selection of pre-defined message blocks. AFAIK (I occasionally do use FT8 at home where I cannot have antennas, so I surreptitiously erect a small vertical under cover of darkness), the FT* modes offer little to no chance of engaging in a conversation and even if it does, the other station would most probably not listen to anything beyond the four overs needed to complete the QSO.
Not being capable of CW, I stick to SSB and, when conditions allow while activating a summit, I often ask the other station how the WX is at their QTH, or what rig they’re running and so on - I try to make it into a convo (and the other OM is glad to partake) even though, being on the autistic spectrum, I’m not exactly known as a great conversationalist. Go figure…
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I get you. A couple of years back, before peak solar cycle, I started making the odd dx qrp contact with the US, Canada and Asiatic Russia. I have to say I was generally disappointed with the 5,5 73 exchange I got in most cases. They felt like a great feat from my end, and my delight would have been easily understood from my voice. May as well have been digital.
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Yes, we’ve all had those and yes: they are disappointing. However, let’s face it, if a lot of chasers are calling, then we may ourselves give out such peremptory exchanges in order to best “serve the field,” until one has a little breathing space to make more of each QSO.
But getting back to the “the entire band seems to be empty, and everybody’s on 14.074, whatever” theme, this is just another sign of the times where people seem to have been so distracted by the ability to “communicate” over vast distances “at the drop of a digital hat”, and to be able at the same time to “win” extra benefits, be they points, or “likes,” or social standing (or even ad-revenue!), that the normal means of social discourse seem to have been cast to one side. It’s all about gain and winning, fed by a fear of somehow losing in the face of ones’ peers - all this in a world seemingly obsessed by profit and greed. Count me out…
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You do occasionally get DX/contest style contacts in SOTA, but in my experience they are not common. Even in the midst of a pile-up both chasers and activators often find time for a greeting and a well-wishing at the end, and sometimes a comment about the summit conditions. This is one of the things that I like about SOTA!
The way the band has sounded this weekend has made that a distant memory, Of course there is the frustration that often the activations that I listen for are outside the paths that are open for me, though I often hear their chasers, but the band is alive with welcome activity.
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My figures for 30m are:
Oct: 11 20 29 30 Mean: 23
Nov: 40 21 29 Mean: 30
Dec: 31 18 40 14 Mean: 26
Jan: 15 21 52 37 59 Mean: 37
Feb: 56 25 24 49 32 29 19 27 Mean: 33
Mar: 24 28 28 38 30 38 14 6 11 Mean: 24
Apr: 10 11 14 24 Mean: 15
May: 10 8 27 6 Mean: 13
Jun: 21 10 6 Mean: 12
So it appears what you consider good is poor for me.
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Yeah, for me 4 or more is good.
Your number of 30m contacts is typically so much higher than mine. You must stay much longer on each band than I do. I notice this when other activators are quoting their results. Your results confirm my original claim, that 30m is consistently reliable [as a means of qualifying a SOTA summit] and apparently less prone to the vagaries of propagation on lower and higher frequency bands.
I wouldn’t take the lower means for April, May and June as statistical significance of poorer propagation [unless the downward trend continues over the next 3 months … perhaps you would let us know] but rather natural variability of which chasers happen to be around and how ‘wanted’ a particular summit is.
My modus operandi is: once I’ve worked though a pile-up or even a bunch of chasers, two CQs and that’s it for me. I’m usually constrained by my time away from home and in winter how long I can stand the cold.
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