Originally Posted By smeeg:


What percentage of hams do digital modes?

Originally Posted By Mach:
Let me tell you my abbreviated story. I am in my 60s, been a fighter pilot and a major airline captain. I have a EE degree. Worked on the first MRI R&D and helped get it to work. I built my own computers from parts back in the early 1990s. I was never tech adverse.

I got an ANAN-7000 after seeing my son's ANAN. Awesome radio. I set it up with Thetis software and had some help getting my audio done right.

Set up FT8. It worked great. Set up FLDigi, and I could not figure out why sometimes it unkeyed when it was supposed to and sometimes it did not unkey with FLDigi.

But I loved using the radio. Somewhere along the line I installed a Thetis upgrade. Digital modes now never unkeyed in FLDigi and in both FLDigi and FT8 and JS8Call the audio got screwed up. The audio selection settings are supposed to be saved with each transmit profile, ie between SSB and Digimode the audio input and output are different and they used to be saved per mode but now they were not. I checked all the settings. I could find nothing wrong.

there is an option to highlight everything in thetis that is saved with the transmit profile and the audio settings were highlighted yellow, but there were not saved for each profile. I upgraded Thetis I downgraded Thetis I read all the forum help and I could not find the issue, nobody was talking about this issue. The radio became a pain in the ass to use and was just a pile of frustration so I turned it off and just stopped playing radio. That was 2 years ago or more.

Last week after putting up a new push-up pole and new fan dipole because my the one I put up in 2017 was brought down by a big branch in the big snow storm.  I turned it on, changed the audio setting for digimode and started making FT8 contacts in Asia, South Pacific, China, Korea, Indonesia Asiatic Russia etc and fell in love with FT8 again. I took a fresh look at the audio settings and Thetis supposedly saving those settings for the transmit modes. After a few hours I suddenly realized that although the audio setting were highlighted in yellow showing that Thetis saved them per individual transmit profile, there was another button. Always one more button. In this case it was a check box, not on the transmit profile page, but on the audio profile page that said if you want audio settings saved with transmit profiles check this box even though the audio selects where  highlighted  in yellow, they are not actually saved unless this button is checked. one of the Thetis updates I did, unchecked this button and it literally took me over 2 years to figure this out and I didn't use the radio for that time.

Having finally figured this out I decided to tackle the unkeying problem again. the unkeying problem was because I accidentally had a stop bit selected as 2 instead of 1.

so getting older sucks and if you don't know the complicated software inside and out these days, it is easy to miss something and with my personality I just said "fuck it" for over 2 years.

I get this was not as an abbreviated post as I expected it to be

My point. As I got older, and with sleeping and pain  issues dulling my brain, I went from tech savvy to dumber than a box of rocks in a short period of time and when Thetis had an issue, even though I spent an ungodly amount of time trying to fix it, It was too much and I just said fuck it and turned it off for good, almost.