Having a bit of spare time on my hands today, I finally installed Version 1.2 Beta of the WSJT-X, which is Joe Taylor’s implementation of JT-9 and JT-65. Although it pained me to stop using Joe Large’s version of JT65-HF, which has served me well for two and a half years, when I saw “Download no longer available, JT65-HF project abandoned” on Laurie’s JT-Alert website, I figured it was time to move on. Plus I knew that there were JT-9 signals lurking a couple of KHz above the usual JT-65 waterfall spots.
The installation went smooth as silk, even for someone who hadn’t read the manual. It took me a bit to figure out how to scale the waterfall window by twiddling with the individual controls, and eventually I figured out that the “JT65 2500 JT9” setting controlled the frequency that JT-9 signals would begin to be decoded (and what the shift 2 KHZ button was for). Going into configuration I soon had my station info entered, and my rig control information all set. The test buttons for PTT and Xmit allowed me to get the transmit levels set (unsurprisingly completely overloaded until I backed the gain slider down to about half). I also assumed that the RX signal bar on the left shouldn’t be pegged off scale, so I adjusted the digital slider down until things were about half scale there too.
Sure enough, signals began to decode every minute — lots more of them that I was used to (it seemed like JT65-HF would decode six or so on 14.076, but I was decoding more than a dozen (they would scroll out of the decode window every minute). Eventually I found a station that seemed to be running JT-9 (very narrow bandwidth) who was calling CQ, and I double clicked on his decoded message and checked on the button to enable transmit. A few seconds later my rig was in transmit, and the signal monitor produced an almost constant tone — but I could hear the slightest warble. After 50 seconds of transmit, I was in my first JT-9 contact with a station in Uruguay.
Being the backward-sort of person I am, its now time to read the manual. Plus I need to install the new version of JT-Alert which supports WSJT-X, and get it interfaced into my HRD 6.0 logbook.
It’s fun to try new things!
