Originally Posted By aa777888-2:
That's the gist of it right there. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when modern digital modes (the "soundcard" modes) first appeared on the scene with PSK31, people took to it in droves because it was easier and faster to make contacts and therefore it was easier and faster to win awards or work DX. The next ten years after that saw an explosion of digital modes, perhaps the most famous being Olivia. Olivia was the first popular HF "weak signal" mode.

All of those modes were keyboard to keyboard chat modes. Sure, people used a lot of canned messages sent with a single keystroke ("macros"), but it was still very much a mix of manual and automatic keyboarding. As such, digi rag-chews were commonplace and there was a lot more going on than just "59 73". But most of the award chasers stuck with PSK31 because it was fast and, perhaps more important, because it allowed a lot of 31.25 Hz wide signals into a single 2.5 or 3KHz passband and therefore making contacts was like shooting a lot of fish in a very small barrel.

Digi activity peaked during the solar cycle minimum that occurred between 2000 and 2010, between Cycles 23 and 24. The combination of stable (in frequency) and reasonably powerful PCs and soundcards, the excellent frequency stability of the radios of that era, some innovative software developers, the crappy propagation and, most interestingly, the end of the Morse code requirement in 2007, together became the perfect storm that caused digi modes to be very popular. And then the Sun woke up for Cycle 24 and people started actually speaking to each other again

As Cycle 24 started to wane, Joe Taylor (K1JT) and Steve Franke (K9AN) got the bright idea to take a page out of the Earth-Moon-Earth (EME) and VHF DX playbook, one that they essentially invented in 2003 with the JT65 mode thanks to those same stable and powerful PCs and soundcards. The result was FT8, first appearing in 2017 as an adjunct mode in their existing EME/VHF-DX/weak signal application, WSJT-X.

With a bandwidth of only 50Hz, FT8 made it shooting fish in a barrel time again. And there were so many fish! Because of the very slow symbol rate used in FT8, five times slower than PSK31, link margin requirements dropped and DX became extremely plentiful. But something had to give, and that something was message length.

Who would have thought that the very structured and limited exchanges that the message length limits of FT8 forced would turn out to be its major feature! It would seem that people love to build their logbooks but could care less about actually talking to each other! And thus FT8, and its descendants such as FT4, have taken over the HF digital mode world and, for most people, the myriad keyboard chat modes of the 2000-2010 decade are lost to the sands of time. Perhaps the only other real player is JS8, which appeals very much to the emcom/survival/prepper/larping crowd.

Originally Posted By K0UA:



That explained things nicely.   But for those of you that have never tried the slower speeds of Olivia, you should check it out. It is amazing how little signal is required for a keyboard to keyboard chat. But as explained above, there is a huge number of hams that DO NOT enjoy talking to their fellow hams.