Let me state up front that I am pretty neutral on FT8. I loved it at first, and JT65 before that, when it was just part of a balanced diet. These days, I am just OK with it. I actually think it might have turned into RF kudzu but it is what it is, and I will work the DX as I find it.
I wanted to inject some fresh perspective (might be presumptuous to call it "data") into this discussion. I left my rig running during last night's pileup, and also on both 20 and 30 today while I was away. I use an SDR skimmer so I can monitor multiple bands at once. I analyzed my ALL.TXT files and found 939 unique calls either calling or being called by FT8WW.
Last year, I had gathered data from the official DXCC standings using a tool I wrote that can be found at
https://github.com/kj4z/standings2db. I still had that database lying around so it was trivial to pipe, cat, grep, awk, and sort my way into a CSV containing the all-time counts per call that I decoded, which can be found at
http://dxcc.kj4z.com/ft8ww.csv.
Out of my 939 decoded calls, 390 of them have DXCC counts above 330. I also counted 5 current NCDXF directors and several past directors. Make of that what you will, but it's a lot of "pointers-and-clickers" at the highest levels of the program.
I am aware of many potential objections to my sloppy methodology but my goal was merely to put a sort of floor under the amount of "real DXers" using FT8. Bear in mind, this is only what one guy in the PNW decoded on his Hustler vertical from a 1/10th acre suburban lot, in pileups for a single call, over less than 24 hours. I am sure I missed as much as I heard. The DXCC standings are a year old since I didn't want to bother refreshing the database, but counts could only have gone up since then. Many hams don't actually submit to ARRL (e.g. my last submission was 7 years ago), so again, numbers can only go up from here. I thought about scraping ClubLog for possibly more accurate numbers but it might violate their ToS and would certainly be rude. Also I only spent about 15 minutes on this, so caveat emptor.
On a happier note, I am enjoying sitting here watching the chaos unfold and knowing I've got this one in the bag that I had long been fearing. '
Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore - The troubled sailor, and hear the tempests roar. -- Lucretius, I think.
A very happy and prosperous new year to you all, and may you find success in the pileups, whatever mode you prefer.
73,
KJ4Z