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[W1VT]

He is often running two or three streams.  You may not hear him come back to you if you can only copy one of them.

[K0UA]

He is often running two or three streams.  You may not hear him come back to you if you can only copy one of them.

Hmmmmm.  why would it be that if you can copy 1 stream you can't copy all of them?  Now I know it happens sometimes, BUT usually if you can copy one stream you can copy the others. The power of the station (lets say 100 watts) is evenly divided among the number of streams. So USUALLY if you copy any of them you copy them all.

Of course one stream could be overrun with a lid transmitting on it, or there can be propagations reasons one may not make it to you.  But USUALLY you will copy all of them. After all they all originate from the same transmitter at the same time.

 Just like a SSB signal will have audio from say 300 Hz to maybe 2800 Hz. and I suppose there could be some degradation of some of the audio information in that bandwidth that might make copy a bit rough, but an FT8 signal of a station that is running 3 streams  and the lowest is on lets say 310 Hz  and it will be 50 Hz wide so to 360 and the next stream will start on 370 and run to 420 and the next will be 430 and run to 480,  that is a pretty narrow band of frequencies to lose a significant amount of information due to propagation anomalies. 

As for the QRP er  as noted above, I guess he calls on SSB without ever hearing the DX too? After all it makes perfect sense that if he never hears your callsign calling, he will never acknowledge you either. But how would you know if he acknowledged you or not? Are you to just assume he will put you in the log if you never respond to him?  The man is a believer in fairy tales.

It saddens and disappoints me that such a large percentage of the ham population is so obtuse and uneducated, but I am finding out it is the truth, and has always been so.

[K5PS]

Hmmm.  why would it be that if you can copy 1 stream you can't copy all of them?  Now I know it happens sometime

I've seen a consistent  difference of 3-4 dB between the 2 streams FT8WW usually runs on 30m.

A few times I've seen FT8WW get stuck calling the same 2 stations for up to 10-12 minutes. I think in some situations it's due to blind calling, but for others it's because they're getting called on the weaker stream

[VE3PP]

Well the Gong Show tonight on 10.131 has guys on there calling CQ as if they were operating on 10.136.

And the Ghost Callers are out there too!

I am in SW Ontario and I briefly copied FT8WW last night, for about 5 minutes then he was long gone.
And yet there were 100's of stations calling him from the eastern portion of USA. My buddy lives just outside NYC, he copied him briefly too, around 8:30 EST. There and gone within 5 minutes he told me.

[KB9WQJ]

I have finally copied him here.  Haven't worked him, but at last decoded him.

[N4KZ]

After about 6 hours spread over 3 nights on 30 meters I finally got my first decode from FT8WW. I received about six transmissions that night but no QSO.

The next night I wised up and used my Geochron digital world clock to track the approaching sunrise at Crozet. As local sunrise approached FT8WW popped out of the noise and I decoded him at -22 db. A couple minutes later he was up to -18. Two more minutes and up to -16.

That’s when I began transmitting and when he rose to -12 he answered me and gave me -7.

That’s when I went for a break. When I came in the shack several minutes later I saw where FT8WW had gotten as strong as -2. I got lucky because he had been hard to decode but using the enhancement of his local sunrise made all the difference.  73 and GL, Dave, N4KZ

[N5PG]

https://www.dx-world.net/an-interview-with-ft8ww/