I live on The Isle of Wight which is right in the center of the south coast of England. I was born and grew up and went to school on the island, but have worked in many places around the country and abroad in my role as a software developer whilst being based in Southampton writing software for SMEs around the world. I also, whilst working there, designed and built hardware for the UK MoD and US DoD and then wrote the software that made it work.

Anyway, enough of that. You know, I think it's time we all moved away from FT8 and started chatting again. There's RTTY, PSK, OLIVIA etc, all of these modes allow us to chat. OLIVIA has excellent FEC and you can decode sigs that are barely audible. So, give it a try. You might even enjoy it.