EURAO FT8 QSO party - a mess!

This week saw an e-mail come through from EURAO, which is pitching itself as a new pan-European representative body for amateur radio.

The message announced an FT8 QSO party this weekend (16-17/12/17) to promote EURAO, which seems like a perfectly good idea.

Unfortunately, things quickly started to unravel when EURAO realised a lot of its announcement made absolutely no sense at all.

Oh dear!

In what appeared to be a 'copy and paste' failure, EURAO advised operators that this wasn't a competition, and that we could talk about anything we liked on air.

For those who are not familiar with FT8 - which seems to include EURAO - FT8 is not a ragchew mode and, due to its sheer speed, is only suited to standardised CQ, report and 73 messages.  It's also impossible to even call CQ in the way prescribed, because, whilst you can type the message in full on-screen, on transmitting there is no room left in the protocol to send it in full, let alone that plus the callsign.  It actually comes out as 'CQ EURAO PART'!

This is how the wording went (accessed 13:42 12/12/2017):

'Call: "CQ EURAO Party".
Exchange: because this is a QSO event, not a contest, you can talk about whatever you want, in any language, and for as long as you like. Here are some topic suggestions to get the conversation going: name, city, locator, weather, antennas, rigs, etc. callsign, locator and signal report, the only data that FT8 allows to exchange.
Also talk about QSL interchange. Tell the truth. Say "no, thanks" if you are not interested in QSL cards. But if you would like to have a memory of your contact, feel free to use our EuroBureauQSL.'

So, a big set of mistakes that leaves EURAO looking like a big, fat lemon.

Update, after the EURAO QSO Party weekend: 

I didn't see a single station calling the prescribed CQ call.