In praise of a Macintosh to decode lots of FT8

Ted VE3TRQ

This evening I just happened to decide I would listen in on the cacophony of FT8 on 40m - I don’t usually bother because I like conversations.. It was wall-to-wall signals for 3 KHz or more - no more than a few hertz between QSOs. I figured my poor old (late 2012 ) iMac would have to chew **** all those signals and might just choke a bit. But it wasn’t dropping a single conversation, and it went on and on like a firehouse, sometimes 40 or more decodes per time period. I decided I should look at the CPU busyness with Activity Monitor - and lo and behold, the CPU was 90 - 95% idle! This whole swath of 3 KHz of FT8 was taking an average of 7% of the system CPU resources, of a 7 year old computer. I don’t have a 6700 and can’t run 8 slices, but the utilization says I probably could. To be fair, when I bought it in 2012, I wanted something to last - it’s a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 system with 32 Gb of memory, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX video chip with lots of VRAM, plus a Fusion drive (spinning disk with a TB of SSD cache in it). It’s running xDax / xCat and wsjt-x 2.0.1. The radio is a 6600M, with the front panel handling the panadapters and slices. The iMac did not need to manage a spectrum and waterfall, but could certainly run dogParkSDR with all four slices and wsjt-x on each. I don’t need no stinkin’ Windows :-) (Please don’t flame me if you love Window and hate Macs - we all use the tools we feel comfortable with!)

Lee - N2LEE

Michael N3LI

K3SF