I got an email today from someone I don’t know telling me:

“I want to share something we’ve been quietly working on for a while. You know how, after the hundredth FT8 contact in a session, your wrist starts complaining? How you find yourself wishing the computer would just… handle it, so you could focus on the radio and the band conditions and the coffee getting cold?”

“So I built something. It’s called Hamilton Auto FT8, and today it gets its own corner of the internet.”

“It sits next to WSJT-X and handles the contact sequence for you. When a callable station appears in the decodes, Hamilton tells WSJT-X to reply. The reports get exchanged automatically. The QSO gets confirmed. The Log QSO dialog gets closed. The contact gets saved. You watch it happen and stay at the radio (where the regulations require you to be — and we’re explicit about that on the site).”

This isn’t surprising. There has been plenty of chatter about fully automated FT8 operations for a few years. Several times when I’ve complained (on the blog) about the whole process feeling too automated I get feedback from readers willing to bet I’ve already logged hundreds of “automatic” contacts at this point.

How would anyone know?

So in addition to wondering if whatever I just read was written by a human or a robot, now I’m also left to wonder if there is anyone on the other end of an FT8 contact. Or if it even matters. This was an inevitable outcome and no one should be shocked. Hams voted with their attention span for a mode that’s as vapid as it is configurable and determined the future of our hobby would be without a soul.

I don’t really care how this turns out though I have removed my DXCC Digital certificate from the wall and shredded it as that’s how much I value it now.