Digital

That PSK no longer dominates the bands is not from lack of effort and creativity from the PODXS club.  Like PSK Golf, in which the world is divided into 18 "holes" of golf                       using Grid Squares. The object is to QSO with someone in these 18 "holes." As you can see I got 15 "holes" but missed out on (11, 13, and 17) which were the ones most                             players missed - and it's easy to see why. 

Of all the digital modes I found when I got back in the hobby in 2007, it was Hellschreiber that really grabbed my attention. For a few years I was very involved in the Feld Hell Club managing the website, their monthly contests, and the awards program. The club still has monthly contests, so you might hear the chirping of Hellschreiber on one of the HF bands.

A Nobel Prize-winner in Physics, Joe (K1JT) is also an avid ham radio operator who has developed a series of digital protocols for weak-signal digital communication such as meteor scatter, ionospheric scatter, and EME (moonbounce) at VHF/UHF frequencies.  Joe's website has details on all the weak-signal modes he has developed.  But almost immediately hams found that these modes useful on HF skywave, especially during long downturns in the susnspot activity, and most especially for those of us operating low power and wire antennas.

Without JT65 I don't know if I could have completed 8BWAS, as it provided a way to QSO with Vermont on 10 meters and Hawaii on 80 (near the nadir of the sunspot cycle, with under 100 watts and a dipole.)  I also completed JT65 WAS in 2010.  (Hams being the tinkerers that we are, W6CQZ developed his own version of software for JT65 which I found a bit easier to use...)

Not content to rest on his laurels, Joe developed a weak-signal mode specifically for HF, called JT-9, along with software that is true "plug and play."  As Joe explains on his website: "JT9 is optimized for the LF, MF, and HF bands.  It  is about 2 dB more sensitive than JT65 while using less than 10% of the bandwidth."  In January 2013 I completed JT9 WAS thanks, in great measure, to VK3AMA's terrific web-based Hamspots..

Thanks to the ingenuity of Dr. Joe Taylor (K1JT) and a team of dedicated collaborators, in 2017 ham radio operators got a new toy to play with, a weak signal digital mode they called FT8 (you can download the software on Joe's site here.)  Faster than JT65 (which takes a minute per transmission cycle) FT8 takes only 15 seconds, yet possesses much of the power to pull and decode weak signals of its older brother.  FT4 is similar to FT8, except with a wider bandwidth and a transmission cycle of 7.5 seconds,

I have WAS in both FT8 and FT4, as well as 200 DXCC with FT8 and 100 using FT4.