DJ3EI's blog

Hint: This page is accessible via the JS8-friendly FAMSIK.DE/JS8 and WWW.FAMSIK.DE/JS8 URIs. Appropriate guide posts pointing here have been erected; depending on your browser-configured language preferences you are guided here or to the German pendant.

What is this about?

JS8 is an enjoyable mode. It has become customary for the JS8 crowd to meet on the bands the second weekend of each month, to enjoy even more. The party starts at 19 UTC in the evening and lasts for 24 hours until 19 UTC the next day. Here is the official invitation.

This page proposes a few party games some people might enjoy.

This is a relaxed party, so no pressure. But if you feel like it, you may take your pick from the following list of fun “challenges”. Think of it as a buffet of offers to choose from. Of course, if you wanted to, you could also systematically work through them all, from top to bottom. We hope that particularly JS8-newcomers will find these “ice breakers” helpful to warm up with the new mode and its possibilities.

The “challenges”

• CHLG1 Observe some station sending a HEARTBEAT to the @HB group and observe how SNR numbers are reported back to that station.

• CHLG2 Send a heartbeat yourself and enjoy the answers.

• CHLG3 Configure your station to answer HEARTBEATs of others automatically, unless busy with other things. (Tip: To maximize party fun, find TX at the top right of the screen and, on the button to the right of it, activate everything, MULTI+AUTO+CONF+HB+ACK.) At some point during the evening, you should see your station answer a heartbeat (preferably soon).

• CHLG4 Wait for a CQ, or place one yourself, and engage in a short or long QSO. If this is your first JS8-QSO ever, please mention it - the other station will be delighted! In JS8, the customary answer to a CQ call is HW CPY?, directed at the calling station. During this QSO, try at least once to add to the end of a message you are sending while its beginning is already being sent (“typeahead”).

• CHLG5 Log that QSO into the JS8call log.

• CHLG6 Save some message to someone’s “inbox” (no typeahead possible here!). You should succeed to get an ACK back.

• CHLG7 Find someone who puts a message into your inbox. See to it that your station sends back an ACK when that incoming message has been received completely and correctly.

• CHLG8 Find someone who stores a message for you locally on their system. As if you knew nothing about it, send a heartbeat. Observe how you are being made aware of that message waiting for you. Fetch it.

• CHLG9 Locally save a message for someone else and watch how this message is being fetched.

• CHLG10 Via Log / Open Log Directory open the log directory and have a look at the files js8call.log and js8call_log.adi you’ll find there, and at the all-encompassing protocol ALL.TXT.

• CHLG11 JS8call comes with groups @GROUP/0 through @GROUP/9. Join one of these groups. If needed, do a bit of advertisement to get other people to also join the group, until it has at least three members.

• CHLG12 Engage in a cultivated conversation in your group. Initially discuss: How do we avoid two of our members sending at the same time (so neither copies the other)?

• CHLG13 When you managed that one, try the “relay via” feature with the people that form your group. You should once send such a text, once relay such a text and once receive such a text.

• CHLG14 In case you are more than three members in the group, let a text be relayed by more than one intermediate relay.

• CHLG15 There’s also the delayed QSP, where some station A asks some station B to store a message intended for later fetching by some station C. Experiment with that. You should send at least one such message, store one such message, and retrieve one such message.