I was reading the digirig article called “VHF/UHF Digital Modes with budget HTs” (link below) and was wondering if it is suggesting that digital modes such as FT8 and JS8Call be used over the “channelized” FM transmit capabilities that most budget HT’s use? Unless I’m mistaken, this will mean that an FT8 or JS8Call transmission will take up the full channel during the course the transmission. On an HF rig with SSB you can share many many more conversations over the same amount of bandwidth. Am I understanding this correctly?
You are correct. This was more of the proof of concept and it worked for the purpose. The modes such as FT8 and JS8Call are utilized best over SSB where multiple parties can transmit over the same audio channel.
Thanks for confirming. I was so excited to think I could do FT8 or JS8Call over my HT 
Unfortunately I am not aware of any HTs that support SSB. Is there a digital mode “made for” channelized VHF/UHF? APRS is one but is not really intended for chat and is “assisted” by digipeaters and so forth. Just wondering what other options there are.
You can still use your FM HT for FT8/JS8Call, just with one station transmitting at a time.
The popular FM modes are Winlink with VaraFM/SoundModem, APRS, SSTV
Hi. I’m very new to ft8 and digital modes, so I may be speaking utter nonsense, if so, apologies in advance and please correct me!
I cannot see why ft8 should not work on 2m (or any other wavelength) FM. Surely it is not the case of one ft8 QSO occupyies the whole channel, rather than one channel being given over to FT8. FT8 will occupy the same bandwidth here as it would anywhere else. What you can do, is that the same channel can carry MANY qsos simultaneously, as is done (with typical 3kHz SSB bandwidth) on the HF bands.
It occurs to me that a budget handheld V/UHF FM rig, coupled with FT8 coming from an old smartphone running FT8CN could be a very low-cost and small, highly portable means of getting on the air. Sure you’re unlikely to have the DX contacts typical of the15 or 20m bands, but if enough people tried it, we may all be very surprised how far we can get on these bands.
The issue with the multiple concurrent QSOs is not that it’s 2m vs HF. It’s with FM vs. SSB.
SSB being a flavor of AM allows tones from multiple simultaneous transmitters to mix together in the way that they can be heard by the receiving station. This is not the case with FM. You probably heard how well that works when multiple operators step on each other while using FM repeater.
Many thanks! I was not aware of that limitation. Confession time - the only time l’ve used FM is to listen to commercial broadcast stations in my car or boat! Licensed since 1983…
I only tried ft8 a few weeks ago + l’m rather taken with it. I just wondered re the portability + low cost of what l proposed + how it might appeal to someone just starting out without undertaking huge expense, or equally as something unobtrusive to use at a relatively crowded campsite or beach.
Cheers!