The receiver in the portable (handheld) CB radio, a multimode from Albrecht, I was using for 10m FT8 monitoring looks like a very poor choice. I have used it for 10m FT8 monitoring for a while, and while it does work, it is not very good.
If I will venture a guess, it is due to a poor performance of the PLL circuit. The FT8 signals look very wide, so I suspect excessive sideband noise.
The advantage was a relatively low power consumption, less than 120mA @ 12V. Good enough when using solar power.
The other reason to change is simply the season. It is the season for sporadic E (Es) propagation on the lower VHF bands, and occasionally on 2m.
So, for now I picked one of my FT817s to set up for FT8 monitoring. It does have a higher power consumption, 300-400mA @ 12V, but especially in the summer time it is working perfectly for 24/7 monitoring. The two inputs of the FT817 mean that I can also connect an HF or VHF/UHF antenna to the RX, and use it for FT8 monitoring for everything from 160m (630m?, 2200m?) to 70cm. One band at a time.
The 6m receive input is connected to the 6m part of my R6000 multiband HF/6m vertical, via a HF/6m diplexer.
This is the least efficient antenna I have for 6m, so if I can get signals on that one, it shows that 6m may be sufficiently open to make contacts with my station.
Small update on the IC-X02 transceivers:
As I decided to use those mostly for monitoring SSB/CW on 6m/2m/70cm, I decided to leave the two IC202s as they are, only making the modification of the power plug.
The 6m one got a cable through the hole for the power supply plug/cable, so an external power supply only is used. I removed the battery connection inside the battery compartment, so it can be used for experiments like adding a CW filter and other niceties. For the 6m band monitoring I still need to build an amplifier/power splitter, so I can use the monitoring on at least 3 receivers: 50313USB for FT8, 50100USB for SSB/CW and 515xx (or so) for FM monitoring.
The IC202 #2 has a modified connection to the power plug, so I can use my standard cables/plugs for this one.
The IC202 #2 (heavily modified) and the IC402 still need power plug connections modified. The IC202 #1 also still needs some detective work to see what the modifications are doing. One is a switchable audio CW filter, so that is a start.
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