FT-Hate

This morning, something has changed on 20m, and it's not a good change.

FT8 is a mode that has attracted instant and widespread appeal, providing a quick way to fill the logbook.

Filling the logbook, it seems, is what most people want to do in radio.

What they are also doing is turning what have been relatively disciplined band plans into a 'wild west', 'transmit from the hip' type of radio. 

The change that I saw this morning was the appearance of FT8 up to 3kHz above the nominal QRG for that mode of 14.074MHz.  This takes it not only across the traditional JT65A portion of the band, but also the JT9 section.  Those modes suffer badly in the face of QRM from FT8.

FT8 is without doubt a very useful mode.  But it is rapidly killing the attraction of radio for me.  At this rate, it won't be long before vast swathes of the bands are taken up solely with FT8. 

Control of the bands needs to be reviewed in the light of these fast changes in digital modes.  But national societies are notoriously slow to realise there is something that needs addressing, let alone actually getting around to doing it.

Personally, I think new modes that clearly have the potential to be very widely adopted should go through some official process that identifies where problems may arise, and deal with them before the mode and associated software package is put on general release.  The disruptive ability of these modes is simply too great to be left to the developer or associated groups to dictate terms.