If you WSPR and nobody hears you ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

The day came to pass when all my set-up and configuration was going to culminate in the moment of truth when I enabled TX on my WSPR mode station. Before I tell you of my experience, I should give you a little bit of background.

A few weeks ago I managed to erect a HF vertical at my home or QTH. That in and of itself was news worthy, well at least to me it was, since it was the first time since I became licensed in 2010 that I had actual real all-band HF capability at home. Last weekend I ran some RG6, yes, 72 Ohm Quad Shield, low-loss coaxial cable, from my antenna, through the roof, into my shack.

I was thrilled.

Immediately set about getting my HF station up and running. This involved installing WSJT-X, a tool that allows you to do weak signal work, perfect for when you're a low power or QRP station like me. I've previously reported using WSPR, Weak Signal Propagation Reporter on a Raspberry Pi and a dongle, but this time I was using my Yaesu FT-857d.

Reports were coming in thick and fast. Managed to hear stations on all the bands I'm allowed on, 80m, 40m, 15m, 10m, 2m and 70cm. Managed to make it report online and update the various maps around the place.

Brilliant!

Now I wanted to do the next thing. Transmit and see who could hear me and how far my beautiful callsign might travel on 5 Watts.

So, after some abortive attempts, I configured the levels correctly, made sure that my antenna coupler, an SG-237, was tuned and hit "Enable TX" on the screen of my computer.

Dutifully my computer did what was expected, turned on the transmitter and happily made the fan run on my radio for two minutes at a time. I tried 80m, 40m and 15m. All worked swimmingly.

Then I looked on the map to see who had heard me.

Nobody. Nothing. Nada. Niets en niemand.

I could hear N8VIM using 5 Watts, 18649 km away, but nobody could hear me, not even the station VK6CQ who is 9 km from me.

So, what's going on?

Turns out that I'm not using a "standard" callsign. That's right, my VK6FLAB, authorised by the World Radiocommunication Conference 2003, implemented by the Australian regulator, the ACMA in 2005 and issued to me in 2010 isn't a standard callsign.

Seems that the deal-breaker is the four letter suffix, FLAB, that's killing my attempts at making contact.

Now I know that there are moves under way, not quite sure what stage they're at, to allow Australian amateurs to apply for any three-letter suffix and keep that regardless of their license level, but that to me doesn't really solve the underlying issue, where a perfectly legal callsign isn't allowed to be used by one of the most popular modes today.

I've lodged a bug report on the WSJT-X mailing list, but to accommodate this callsign will probably require a fundamental change in the way the WSPR mode and likely several other JT modes will work, not to mention the databases, the maps, API calls and other fun things like logging.

Technically I could have figured this out back in September 2019 when I was first allowed to use digital modes with my license, but I didn't have an antenna then.

In case you're wondering. I also investigated using a so-called extended, or type-2 message, but that allows for an add-on prefix that can be up to three alphanumeric characters or an add-on suffix that can be a single letter or one or two digits.

I could use something like VK6FLA/B, but I'm sure that the owner of VK6FLA would be upset and using VK6/F0LAB might have a French amateur yell Merde! at me when they spot their callsign being transmitted from VK6.

One suggestion was to upgrade my license.

What's the fun in that?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB