A couple of evenings ago, I was running 14MHz WSPR on receive-only. By about 21UT, about an hour earlier than is usual at the moment, there was essentially nothing coming through to me.
Not seeing the point of running overnight receive, I decided to have a quick look at the FT8 portion of the band. Here, the band was anything but dead! Several signals, clustered towards central and south America, were coming in at strong levels.
I chanced a 'CQ' at about 15W, and immediately completed a QSO with a station in Panama - HP8RY.
Now, WSPR has about 10dB better sensitivity than FT8. Despite this, it's pretty obvious that, if WSPR is yielding a result where there is apparently no propagation, but a QSO is then completed with FT8 with only moderately higher power, then WSPR is not a reliable indicator of propagation.
This is more especially true when one considers the fragments of WSPR that momentarily appeared on the waterfall. They lasted for only a few seconds, and could be quite strong. FT8, on a 15 second cycle, can potentially make use of those brief openings, or bits of dying propagation. WSPR can't.
Overall, I'm coming around to the idea that WSPR is perhaps of less use than once was the case. One major advantage of FT8 is that it has lots of people listening, and doesn't suffer so much from other modes, like RTTY, because it's obvious that FT8 is popular, has a clearly-defined place on the bands, and is easily detectable.
What do you think?
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