First MFSK16 contact

Was chatting with Dallas, VK3DJ, on 14.070Mhz PSK31 when he mentioned his interest in the MFSK16 mode, having not tried it I suggested we give it a go. We QSYd to 14.080 and he called me while I figured out how to drive the software.

MFSK16 is a much wider signal than the little PSK31 pairs, it looks like this on the waterfall display.

On the receiver, it sounds rather musical. Because it's spread out it's more immune to interference or selective fading.

I'm using CocoaModem at my end and it seems very smart in the way it decodes, here's the tuning indicator showing a very clean decode:

Compared to PSK31 there is a delay I think before characters are decoded, presumably that's the forward error correction at work, but I got pretty good copy from Dallas over 1,000km away running 20W: