My First Olivia Contact on HF

Within the past week, I've been starting to use some of the digital modes on HF. I first tried PSK31 by successfully making a few contacts. Then I made a contact using MFSK16. Very early this morning I had a successful QSO using Olivia. Specifically the mode was Olivia 500/16. The 500/16 designation means that the occupied bandwidth is 500 Hz and the number of tones used is 16.

My QSO was with WB8ROL. His name is Gary and he is located in Ludlow Falls, Ohio. It's a town I've visited a few times, when I used to live in Dayton. Ludlow Falls always had a rather impressive Christmas light display at the Falls. The town recently discontinued the display due to funding issues. Ludlow Falls is about 80 miles from me, so this contact was decidedly not DX. It was a memorable contact nonetheless. Gary was using a Yaesu FT-100D and running about 30 watts. I very quickly noticed that Olivia 500/16 is not a particularly fast mode, but my copy on Gary was 100% complete. He explained to me how he has had Olivia QSOs that he could neither hear on the speaker, nor see on the waterfall display of the software. He only knew that there was a Olivia transmission because it started decoding on his screen.

Gary made a suggestion that we each try to lower our power levels to see how well the copy would be. For the last five to ten minutes of the QSO, he was at 2 watts and I was at 5 watts (the lowest the Kenwood TS-2000X will go) and we still had perfect copy on each other. We briefly tried the 500/8 (500 Hz, 8 tones) variety. The copy was almost perfect. I saw on my screen was could have been a typo or was a mis-decoded character. Whatever it was, I was able to figure out what was said. Olivia 500/8 is noticeably faster than 500/16. Band conditions on 40-meters this morning must have been fairly decent as I was able to hear the transmission and see it on the waterfall the whole time. My QSO with Gary was also my longest at about a half-hour. The QSO came to an end at 0451Z on 3 Aug 2008. The center frequency was 7.0733 MHz.

I did briefly have a problem with my station. During the middle of a transmission my radio switched back to receive. At first I thought that a time out timer that I had set on the TS-2000 had kicked in, but I believe that instead RF was getting into my Tigertronics SignaLink interface. At the beginning of the QSO, I was running 35 watts.

You should give Olivia a try. Olivia 500/8 might be a good compromise between perfect copy and speed.

73