I was not able to participate in the public FT8 DX Expedition mode testing which occured in the months leading up to the Baker Island expedition. I very much wanted to be prepared to work the expedition once they were QRV. I was fortunate to work KH1/KH7Z on 20m phone on the second day which is an new one for me. With KH1/KH7Z in the log I then began to monitor for FT8 spots, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Once Baker was QRV I wanted to ensure my setup was correct by referencing the setup instructions on the Baker2018 website. As well as the WSJT-X manual and recommendations from the FlexRadio forum on which mode to use for Splits, the correct answer BTW is “FakeIt”.
Confident that I had a good setup unlike the many stations calling the first couple of days. I just needed to wait to hear them, which occured the morning of July 1st just as a thunderstorm was moving to the west. I started to see the parallel transmissions from the island come up out of the noise on the low end of the audio range which is very cool. You can see this in the big screen shot below, start to finish took 3 minutes and 30 seconds to get them in the log.
Pretty cool, parallel TX from KH7Z can be seen in the screen capture below.
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