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After yesterday’s disappointing session on 15m PSK31 I tried JT9-1 again. The new JT mode showed its superiority by giving me two contacts with Japan. I nearly worked more as one JA replied to my CQ but disappeared after I sent his report. I was also spotted on HamSpots by two other JAs whom I have never seen on my screen. Another nice contact was with HS0ZBS. This is not the first time I have worked Thailand, but all my contacts with that country have been on 15m.

In another direction I worked PJ2MI – a familiar callsign. Checking my log we first worked in 2003 using PSK63 – quite an achievement as I would have been using my K2 and 4W output. More recently I have worked Jose using PSK31 and JT65A. On 20m I worked K8CZC who from the look of his eQSL would have been using low power (QRP).

It was inevitable this would happen: someone has started a Yahoo! group for the JT9 mode. Pity they couldn’t have made it a Google group like the one for JT65A but I guess more hams have Yahoo! accounts than Google accounts.

There was already a fairly quiet WSJT group but this will keep the discussions about using JT9 on HF separate from the rather esoteric MS and EME stuff.

I only managed 4 QSOs in abour as many hours using JT9-1 this morning. I worked LU8EX whom I recognized having made a JT65A contact with him in the past. Hopefully more operators will make the switch from JT65A to JT9-1. At the moment it feels like I’ve worked everybody. I was spotted many times by VK3AMA even when I was running 5 watts. Pity there is no-one else in Oz using the mode yet.

I switched to PSK31 in the afternoon and my QSO rate immediately improved. A nice catch was Luc PR8EP whose QSL card I picture here.

Another good one was Eric HS0ZJK in Phetchaburi, Thailand. He is only the second Thai station I have worked, and both were on 15m.

I see that some bloggers have complained that HF propagation today was not too good. My 5W JT9-1 signal on 20m was spotted several times at reasonable strength by VK3AMA so this afternoon I thought I would see how far I could get with 1 watt.

Reception of JT9-1 signal from G4ILO using 1W to attic dipole

If you get the impression that I’m keen on K1JT’s new JT9-1 mode, you’d be right. This morning my signal (25W to an attic dipole) was spotted by Laurie VK3AKA in Australia – the longest distance I’ve been received using JT9-1 yet. A QSO must surely follow.

My signals down under were -18dB. Yes, it seems Laurie is testing some new add-on for WSJT-X that spots to Hamspots with additional info. Exciting stuff! JT9-1 is turning out to be the WSPR QSO mode that many hoped for.

I just worked Iraq for the first time. YI1RZ on 20m using JT9-1 mode.

YI1RZ

What was remarkable about this QSO is that I worked YI1RZ despite the presence of heavy RTTY QRM. My Elecraft K3 has great filtering but it can do nothing about a RTTY signal that is straddling the QSO frequency.

Why, in this age of DSP, do people persist in using this antiquated mode? Dating from the 1930s and the age of mechanical teleprinters and analog modems, RTTY is by any definition an outmoded mode. It requires far too much power and occupies far too much bandwidth for the data transmission rate (45 baud.) PSK31 has existed for more than a decade and is a far more efficient mode. If PSK31 is too slow then there is PSK63 which is faster than RTTY and yet still manages to occupy less bandwidth. Not to mention the plethora of other modes such as MFSK and Olivia that have been invented in the last 10 years offering far greater reliability than RTTY and, like PSK, the ability to use the entire character set not just capital letters, numbers and a few punctuation symbols. And which don’t print up garbage because a shift character wasn’t decoded.

It feels good to get that off my chest! I’d better put my asbestos suit on! It is interesting to note that as I have been typing this WSJT-X has been pulling JT9-1 out of the air in the teeth of RTTY interference so great that you cannot even see the JT9-1 signal traces. JT9 rocks! I doubt if the RTTY operators even know the JT9-1 signals are there.

JT9 just got even better. Thanks to Laurie, VK3AMA, JT9 has a new page to show current activity or general chat at hamspots.net.

As far as I can tell, the spots are generated from the spots to PSK Reporter, which the latest WSJT-X program does automatically if you tick the appropriate box. So you don’t have to do anything extra for your spots to show up on this page. This is a great facility that I am sure will increase the growing popularity of the JT9 mode.