I had noticed that my waterfall was showing 20 or more signals that should be decoding, but only a few were. Nevertheless I continued to work stations for this final month of the International Grid Chase. I became concerned that the internal sound card in my K3s had been damaged. So today I hooked up a different external sound card and had the same small number of decodes. That was a good thing, it meant that my radio was fine. Must be something wrong with configuration of WSJT-X.
Before tearing into things, I went to the WSJT-X website and immediately noticed a fairly stern warning that said the FT8 protocol had been changed in a way that was no longer compatible with older version like mine (1.9.1). Users were urged to upgrade to 2.0.0 quickly and no longer use the older version starting Jan 1 2019.
Well, that’s the explanation. In the past few days the standard changed. My out of date program wasn’t decoding the calls from newer 2.0.0 users. I updated, and life is back to how I remember it.
Be sure to update your WSJT-X
