I was curious to see if an old 2 m transceiver was able to handle FT-8 signals. Therefore I removed the dust from my 40 year old Sommerkamp FT-480R and connected it to my pc via a simple interface.
After waiting a few minutes, the internal oscillator of the FT-480R appeared to be stable enough to make good FT-8 contacts. Both in low power (1 Watt) and hi power (10 Watt) I could make nice QSO’s around 144.175 MHz. FT-8 activity in UK, B, F and D allowed me to make contacts with the neighbour countries .
