“Hi all,

Many of us have made many QSOs using the new 77-bit messages on 7.078 and 14.078 MHz. Overall the results have been good — but not surprisingly, bugs are being identified. Several are important enough to warrant a second candidate release well before the originally suggested target date, October 15. We will make a suitable announcement here, after things have settled down a bit.

Many have noticed signals in the 7.078 and 14.078 MHz sub-bands that look like FT8 but are undecodable. These appear to be “FT8CALL”
signals. FT8CALL is *not* FT8 — and probably it should not have “FT8”
in its name. It appears that the author of FT8CALL did not bother to select a different Costas array for synchronization. If the legacy FT8 decoder is enabled, WSJT-X will waste time fruitlessly trying to decode these non-FT8 messages.

For the record, and to avoid the necessity for multiple posts on the same issue, here is a list of currently known bugs:

1. If a message’s first callsign contains only characters 0-9 and A-F it will be interpreted as a hexadecimal number. The message will be transmitted and decoded as if the first callsign were telemetry data; the remaining parts are lost. (Apologies to holders of all such callsigns… we’ll fix this very soon.)

2. Some nonstandard callsigns (for example, 8Z88ND) are not recognized as nonstandard. Consequently the auto-generated messages do not include <…> brackets, and free-text messages are improperly sent. (Again, our
apologies…)

3. Bare CQs (with no grid locator) are flagged as new DXCCs.

— 73, Joe, K1JT”