Last evening I made my first MFSK16 digital contact on HF. What an amazing mode MFSK is! My QSO was with Tom, K5VJZ. Tom is located in Russellville, Arkansas. This location is about 650 miles from me. We were on 40-meters at approximately 7.07 MHz. Our contact specifically ended on 1 Aug 2008 at 0149Z. Tom was running 25 watts from an Elecraft K2/100 transceiver. His computer was running a program called Fldigi and his operating system was Ubuntu, which if I am not mistaken is a Linux variant. I was using my Kenwood TS-2000X. For most of the QSO, I was also running 25 watts, but towards the end I ran 30 watts. The copy was almost perfect on my end which is amazing considering the RF power level used and the distance.
Just a little background on this mode. It consists of 16 tones that occupy a total bandwidth of a little over 300 Hz. Forward Error Correction (FEC) is involved. Some have equated it to a souped-up version of RTTY (radioteletype).
I've only made five digital contacts on HF so far, but I really enjoy them. This particular QSO with Tom lasted about ten minutes. I had the chance to ask him about a Palstar tuner that he uses in his station. He also explained that he did not have the best of luck with the Tigertronics SignaLink interface, which is what I use.
Another thing that I am noticing is that I am starting to get the urge to chase some of the awards. I never thought I would be interested in that, but going awards should certainly help me improve my skills and also encourage me to improve my station.
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