What a rabbit hole I’ve been entering the past few days!
I’ve been trying to figure out ways to make FT8 and FT4 more human and more fun to operate. Using GridTracker is certainly fun to see visually where signals are flying to and from, especially when I let my imagination wonder what its like to visit and eat a given locations cuisine!
A few months ago I started working on a little software project. To make working digital modes more fun, I would try to find out more information on a given call sign. Of course I could type in a call sign into the QRZ search page but it would be easier if the computer did it for me. A few months later of on-again and off-again operating on digital modes (I prefer any kind of voice over digital most of the time) I wrote a little node.js script called “FTQSO” to do the QRZ search for me! I also had variants in JavaFX, Python, and Rails – just because.
Here’s a screenshot of the console window showing it working during an active session of my having active QSO’s. Similar information is presented in a website window so that you could view bios from a different computer or phone if you wanted.
FTQSO works quite well. I’ve been tweaking things to try to make working FT4 (which I’m usually on more than FT8) a little more fun. Basically it will listen to WSJT-X and when it hears that I’m in an active QSO with someone, it will pop up a web page at their QRZ bio. So instead of just looking at GridTracker and waiting for the QSO to finish, I go and read their bio.
Reading peoples bio’s has been very fun for me. I feel like I’ve gotten to know the guy on the other side a little better (I haven’t had a FT4 QSO with an XYL yet using FTQSO). Most people have photos of their shack’s as well as their other hobbies and families.
This morning, I was tweaking FTQSO and working the FT Roundup. I came across a guy’s bio that mentioned that he stopped hamming in the 1980’s because of the Russian Woodpecker.
Russian Woodpecker? What’s that? A disease I never learned about in med school?
No! It was something far more interesting (look it up yourself!). I ended up looking it up and went down a rabbit hole.
This is one of the things I love and wanted to write FTQSO for – so that I would purposely look up digital contacts’ Bios in real-time while I was in a QSO with them, in the moment, to sort of get to know this person a little better, in the absence of hearing their voice come over the radio waves which would otherwise focus 100% of my attention on them.
So far I’ve read tens of bios and have been very entertained and inspired. Everyone has an interesting history, family, hobby, or something else that I love reading about. FT8 and FT4 is starting to become more fun because of this aspect, and I can see myself adding some more features like doing lookups elsewhere or mapping their QTH or grid square (kind of like the much more full-featured GridTracker).
Anyway, just thought I’d pass along another feel-good aspect of ham radio.
73,
ae0rs
