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Author Topic: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?  (Read 2194 times)

WO7R

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #75 on: February 02, 2023, 02:28:17 PM »

Quote
alt.progress.sucks

Hilarious!

Also:  eHam arguments in a nutshell.
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N5PG

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #76 on: February 02, 2023, 03:50:22 PM »

I used to like Usenet :)

 rec.radio.amateur.dx  there was a list of hams who had email (usually via employers), it wasn't all that long either !!
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W2IRT

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #77 on: February 02, 2023, 05:05:25 PM »

I was hot-and-heavy into Usenet newsgroups; some discussion, some binaries at the time. Once AOL started access, a.k.a. "Eternal September," that was the end of it.

Instantaneous DX news is great, spotting clusters are more helpful than not, and the RBN with other online tools makes DXing easier, but the more I read the old 1960s and 1970s "West Coast DX Bulletins," the more I kinda wish I'd been around in those days, when DXing news came into your physical mailbox only once a week. What massive cultural changes we've seen in those fifty years! But through it all, DX still IS!
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Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until I reach Top of the Honor Roll

Great times are at hand, and soon there will be DX for all—although more for some than for others.

KJ4Z

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #78 on: February 02, 2023, 05:40:20 PM »

I was hot-and-heavy into Usenet newsgroups; some discussion, some binaries at the time. Once AOL started access, a.k.a. "Eternal September," that was the end of it.

I remember it being real hit and miss whether your ISP allowed access, carried every group you wanted, and so on.  As the system grew many ISPs just dropped it altogether due to insupportable syncing complexity.  The current approach is, IMO, better in probably every respect.

Quote
Instantaneous DX news is great, spotting clusters are more helpful than not, and the RBN with other online tools makes DXing easier, but the more I read the old 1960s and 1970s "West Coast DX Bulletins," the more I kinda wish I'd been around in those days, when DXing news came into your physical mailbox only once a week. What massive cultural changes we've seen in those fifty years! But through it all, DX still IS!

Do you remember the Flying Horse callbook?  I remember having one set because it was pretty expensive for a teenager.  I called my Elmer to have him look up stuff for me in his paper books, and in turn, he called me to look up stuff for him on the internet.  I can look back with nostalgia but the current setup is infinitely more practical.  I also got paper bulletins and those were expensive too.
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W2IRT

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #79 on: February 02, 2023, 06:43:17 PM »

Do you remember the Flying Horse callbook?
Remember it? I have a couple of sets. Or at least I know I had; they're probably in the basement or storage closet but I can't tell you the last time I ever opened one. The last DX bulletin I subscribed to was the online "Daily DX" by W3UR. Great resource, but time marched on, alas, and I just wasn't able to justify the cost. Bernie's a fantastic person and I felt really bad when I let my subscription lapse--it fact I held onto it for two years beyond when I first considered dropping it.
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Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until I reach Top of the Honor Roll

Great times are at hand, and soon there will be DX for all—although more for some than for others.

KD8MJR

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #80 on: February 02, 2023, 07:51:18 PM »

I used to like Usenet :)

 rec.radio.amateur.dx  there was a list of hams who had email (usually via employers), it wasn't all that long either !!

Usenet is still around and being used daily but rec.radio.amateur.dx no longer exists.
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“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”  (Mark Twain)

WO7R

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #81 on: February 03, 2023, 12:10:24 AM »

One of the great benefits of club membership in those days was access to the Winged Horse book that the Club owned.

I would kind of "batch up" my requests, go down to the Dungeon of Netherworld where we had our Club Station (it was space nobody wanted) and spend a part of my lunch hour copying down several addresses from the tiny print in that book.  I was young enough that the print size didn't bother me then.
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W2IRT

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #82 on: February 04, 2023, 11:04:34 AM »

16,148 copies of the latest version of WSJT-Z have been downloaded.  For ham radio software, that's a blockbuster.  Are they all there just for the filtering?  Call it Checkhov's Checkbox.  The automation features would not be there unless they were being used.
The fact is the current version hiccups a lot in full-auto, or at least it did when I played with it last summer. I can say with certainty that it required human assistance regularly when I last experimented with it. Wrong macros being the worst, and no way to turn off the automation after a predefined time.
So this afternoon, just for hoots and giggles, I put WSJT-Z into Auto-CQ and sat there and watched what it would do. Sure enough, it CQ'd as expected, and answered the first station to reply (all filters were off). It sent a report, the other station send R-10 or whatever his report was to me, but instead of sending RR73 it kept sending my report to him over and over until it went back into CQ. I manually replied and logged the station, but let it go back into auto-CQ. Seemed to work for a few minutes until the above happened again. It then ran OK for about 10 minutes and the integration to my logger stopped, and I started getting error messages. The Qs logged to the app's internal log but were backlogged to DXKeeper. After 20 minutes I shut it off. I maintain that while it does have some functionality that "Some People" may find useful, it's absolutely not something I would ever consider putting into "set-it-and-forget-it" mode, even if it was fully legal and acceptable for awards. And it's no fun, despite my being there at the keyboard/screen and ready to manually override if necessary. No way is that ready for prime-time IMHO. Back to doing it the real way for me.
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Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until I reach Top of the Honor Roll

Great times are at hand, and soon there will be DX for all—although more for some than for others.

KJ4Z

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #83 on: February 04, 2023, 11:21:35 AM »

I put WSJT-Z into Auto-CQ and sat there and watched what it would do....
What you are describing sounds pretty much exactly like the "suspected bot" behavior I mentioned in a much earlier post.  At this point, I consider it pretty much confirmed that there are bots using this software in the wild.  How many, I have no idea, but more than one.  If I gave the impression before that I thought everyone was going to be running auto-FT8, that was not my intent.  I only was presenting my opinion, as a software engineer, that automating it is so straightforward that it practically begs to be done.  We can detect the "bad bots" now but if there are good ones that have been carefully developed, we'd probably never know.  Does that even matter?  Up to each of us to decide.

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And it's no fun, despite my being there at the keyboard/screen and ready to manually override if necessary. No way is that ready for prime-time IMHO. Back to doing it the real way for me.
100% agreed.  I find regular FT8 at best a tool to get the jerb done.  Automating it would be an interesting challenge.  Operating someone else's script would be about as fun as watching paint dry.
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KD8MJR

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #84 on: February 04, 2023, 12:02:24 PM »

16,148 copies of the latest version of WSJT-Z have been downloaded.  For ham radio software, that's a blockbuster.  Are they all there just for the filtering?  Call it Checkhov's Checkbox.  The automation features would not be there unless they were being used.
The fact is the current version hiccups a lot in full-auto, or at least it did when I played with it last summer. I can say with certainty that it required human assistance regularly when I last experimented with it. Wrong macros being the worst, and no way to turn off the automation after a predefined time.
So this afternoon, just for hoots and giggles, I put WSJT-Z into Auto-CQ and sat there and watched what it would do. Sure enough, it CQ'd as expected, and answered the first station to reply (all filters were off). It sent a report, the other station send R-10 or whatever his report was to me, but instead of sending RR73 it kept sending my report to him over and over until it went back into CQ. I manually replied and logged the station, but let it go back into auto-CQ. Seemed to work for a few minutes until the above happened again. It then ran OK for about 10 minutes and the integration to my logger stopped, and I started getting error messages. The Qs logged to the app's internal log but were backlogged to DXKeeper. After 20 minutes I shut it off. I maintain that while it does have some functionality that "Some People" may find useful, it's absolutely not something I would ever consider putting into "set-it-and-forget-it" mode, even if it was fully legal and acceptable for awards. And it's no fun, despite my being there at the keyboard/screen and ready to manually override if necessary. No way is that ready for prime-time IMHO. Back to doing it the real way for me.

Did you update to the latest version?
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VK3HJ

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #85 on: February 04, 2023, 12:08:44 PM »

Did you update to the latest version?
You really seem fascinated by this thing.
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KM4SII

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #86 on: February 04, 2023, 12:10:15 PM »

It then ran OK for about 10 minutes and the integration to my logger stopped, and I started getting error messages. The Qs logged to the app's internal log but were backlogged to DXKeeper.
I'm guessing you are using JTAlert to send QSOs to DXkeeper to be logged. It is a known issue that JTAlert and WSJT-Z do not get along and that is by design. The creator of JTAlert apparently does not like his software being used with WSJT-Z, so JTAlert is designed to stop functioning with WSJT-Z after about 20 minutes.
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KJ4Z

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #87 on: February 04, 2023, 12:15:59 PM »

It then ran OK for about 10 minutes and the integration to my logger stopped, and I started getting error messages. The Qs logged to the app's internal log but were backlogged to DXKeeper.
I'm guessing you are using JTAlert to send QSOs to DXkeeper to be logged. It is a known issue that JTAlert and WSJT-Z do not get along and that is by design. The creator of JTAlert apparently does not like his software being used with WSJT-Z, so JTAlert is designed to stop functioning with WSJT-Z after about 20 minutes.

Wow.  Internecine ham software war.  Amazing!
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W2IRT

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #88 on: February 04, 2023, 01:32:15 PM »

It then ran OK for about 10 minutes and the integration to my logger stopped, and I started getting error messages. The Qs logged to the app's internal log but were backlogged to DXKeeper.
I'm guessing you are using JTAlert to send QSOs to DXkeeper to be logged. It is a known issue that JTAlert and WSJT-Z do not get along and that is by design. The creator of JTAlert apparently does not like his software being used with WSJT-Z, so JTAlert is designed to stop functioning with WSJT-Z after about 20 minutes.
Yeah, I'm using JTAlert 2.16.6 and -Z mod 2.5.4. Supposedly that's the last version of JTAlert that works (for some definition of the word). I'm not worried enough about it to bother changing anything to be honest. For the way I operate (S&P needs and running Asia when I'm bored), I'm satisfied with that combination for its robust filtering abilities. And besides, I figure every time I attempt to "upgrade" software it ends up being another set of configuration problems that I cannot solve, so I just leave well enough alone.
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Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until I reach Top of the Honor Roll

Great times are at hand, and soon there will be DX for all—although more for some than for others.

W2IRT

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Re: The Golden Days of DXing or the End of Days?
« Reply #89 on: February 05, 2023, 09:20:40 AM »

I woke up to DX alarms triggering on my phone just after 1am today. I wandered into the shack, and after shaking the cobwebs from my braincells and putting my glasses on and I saw this. The station in question was also worked by FO0L, R0BOT, TR0LL, and IM2DUM (who apparently is in grid "FO69"). The best part was other stations calling TR0LL afterwards.
 
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Night gathers and now my watch begins. It shall not end until I reach Top of the Honor Roll

Great times are at hand, and soon there will be DX for all—although more for some than for others.
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