FT8 and RTTY

I have been deliberating about it for weeks but I finally bit the bullet and bought an Icom IC-7300. It does everything I need and even more. I still haven't been able to get around to erecting my multi-band antenna yet because of the searing heat we are experiencing at the moment. I can operate on 10m so I set up to do some FT8 QSO's just to try the rig out. It took me a couple of days to get to grips with this rig because it does so much - there are hidden menus everywhere. Once I had set up and turned the power down to 10W, I jumped straight in with the FT8 and made 4 contacts almost immediately on 28.074MHz, 1 in Germany and 3 in Spain (see the Contacts page). Not bad for 10 Watts running on a 10m 1/2 wave horizontal wire dipole in the loft. I am using MSHV for the decoding and transmitting.

Just out of interest, I dug this info up from somewhere, I forget where from at the moment. It lists the dB signal and correlates them with the S numbers:

-26 = NOISE FLOOR
-20  = s1
-14  = s2
-8    = s3
-2    = s4
+4   = s5
+10 = s6
+16 = s7
+22 = s8
+28 = s9

 Next I turned my attentions to RTTY and Wefax. Again on the same antenna. I found a German weather transmission for RTTY on about 10.1MHz and a German Wefax station at 7.878MHz (Deutscher Wetterdienst). I used Fldigi for the decoding here. The results were a bit scratchy but as a proof of concept, it all seems to work. The poor images could be due to the incorrect antenna for the job and the fading signal.