[600MRG] WSJT-X 1.9 v 1.8 second night

[Bill Cromwell]

Hi,

I finally took a sip of the WSJT-X kool-aid and had a run at ft8 
(receive only). I played with it a couple of days and followed 
propagation around most of today. I got it to copy 'right out of the 
box'. It's the first time WSJT-anything ever put anything at all on my 
screen. There is more for me learn and can undoubtedly make if find more 
stations. But I did give it a sever test!

The receiver is reasonable Kenwood R-599. The antenna is an unreasonable 
ten foot wire running from the RX up and over the drapes in the room. 
Not very much! I copied stationed from 160 meters through 20 meters - 
lots of stations.

I intend to play with it some more but my digital modes will be CW, 
RTTY, and PSK-31. If I learn more about it I will be able to follow 
conversations about it with a little more understanding. I can tolerate 
watching it. I have also watched paint dry, usually while I was doing 
something else nearby. Hey..I'm trying to understand the FT-8 guys so 
meet me halfway. To me it looks just like paint drying:) Maybe FT-9 can 
be enhanced to carry a slightly larger payload:)

73,

Bill  KU8H

On 02/27/2018 09:00 AM, WM3M wrote:
> Appreciate the info.
>
> Some informal additional info, yesterday I downloaded ver 1.9, ran WSPR
> receive all night and for first time copied several stations in Europe.
>
> Thank you  73
>
> Emory   WM3M
>
> On 2/27/2018 8:39 AM, N1BUG wrote:
>>
>> Last night 1.9 continued to have a clear advantage but by a much
>> narrower margin that the first night.
>>
>> In 12 hours ending 1100z:
>>
>> LF 178 decodes with 1.9, 174 with 1.8
>> MF 890 decodes wtih 1.9, 838 with 1.8
>>
>> Maybe propagation is the reason? Joe Taylor offered this information
>> regarding the new WSPR decoder:
>>
>> ...
>>
>> You may be interested to know a bit more about how this enhancement
>> works -- and why it's so effective at LF and MF but provides little or
>> no advantage at HF.
>>
>> All of the JT modes use continuous-phase frequency-shift keying (CPFSK),
>> but with the exception of MSK144 the software demoduators estimate
>> soft-symbol values independently for each symbol interval. In other
>> words, we generally do not take advantage of the phase continuity that
>> should exist across symbol boundaries. The new WSPR demodulator treats
>> received data coherently in blocks up to 3 symbols long. If the radio
>> channel is stable enough, we find the resulting WSPR sensitivity
>> threshold is approximately -31.5 dB.
>>
>> The scheme provides no benefit at HF because even a block size of two
>> symbols (about 1.4 s) generally exceeds the coherence time of the HF
>> channel.
>>
>> ...
>>
>> My parallel 1.9 vs 1.8 test will continue on both LF and MF.
>>
>> 73,
>> Paul N1BUG
>>
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