Another Contact with Content

Last Sunday while idly dialing around on the 40m PSK sub-band, I had a brief contact with a guy up in north Alabama.  Band conditions were lousy, so we traded signal reports and went our separate ways.  When I looked up the guy's call sign to fill out a QSL card, holy smoke, he's the author of fldigi (among other programs), the very digital mode program I was using to talk with him.  Here's his web site, and a page all about identifying which digital mode you're seeing on a waterfall display. Particularly noteworthy though is how that page gives a brief description of the properties of each mode, and what the mode's good for.  It's an interesting read, because while the "hows" for each mode is easy to find, descriptions of the "whys" for various digital modes are rare.

Anyway, you never know who you're going to run into when you step into the HF bands: backpackers, bluegrass enthusiasts, program developers, all kinds of creative people.