WSJT-X Official

The project & its people

About WSJT-X

Since 2001, WSJT-X and its forerunners have let amateur radio operators make contacts once thought impossible — bouncing signals off meteor trails and the surface of the Moon, and decoding callsigns buried far below the noise floor.

A short history

WSJT — “Weak Signal communication, by K1JT” — began as one physicist’s effort to make exotic propagation modes practical for ordinary stations. Two decades later, its modes are used worldwide every day.

  1. 2001WSJT is released, with FSK441 for high-speed meteor scatter.
  2. 2003JT65 arrives and becomes the standard for Earth-Moon-Earth (moonbounce).
  3. 2005The software is released as open source under the GNU GPL.
  4. 2008WSPR — Weak Signal Propagation Reporter — probes paths with very low power.
  5. 2013WSJT-X, a modular Qt rewrite, introduces JT9; Bill Somerville (G4WJS) joins to form the core team.
  6. 2016MSK144 modernizes meteor-scatter operation.
  7. 2017FT8, co-designed by Steve Franke (K9AN) and Joe Taylor (K1JT), is released — within two years the most popular digital mode on the bands.
  8. 2019FT4 brings a faster, contest-oriented sibling of FT8.
  9. 2021FST4/FST4W for the LF/MF bands and Q65 for difficult paths join the suite.

The people

WSJT-X is built by an international team of volunteers. Three are central to its story.

Joe Taylor K1JT

Creator & maintainer · Nobel laureate in Physics

Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. (b. 1941, Philadelphia) is an astrophysicist who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics with Russell A. Hulse for the discovery of the first binary pulsar, PSR B1913+16 — whose orbital decay gave the first evidence for gravitational waves. He was a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and then Princeton University, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty (now professor emeritus). A lifelong amateur first licensed as a teenager, he created the WSJT software in 2001 and continues to lead and maintain WSJT-X.

Steve Franke K9AN

Co-developer of FT8 & the modern codes

Steven J. Franke is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With Joe Taylor he co-developed FT8 in 2017 — the “F” in the Franke–Taylor design — and the forward-error-correcting codes and decoders at the heart of today’s WSJT-X modes.

Bill Somerville G4WJS SK

Core developer · 2013–2021

A software engineer and chemistry graduate, Bill Somerville was the first to join Joe Taylor in 2013 to form the core WSJT-X development group. He wrote much of the Qt-based user interface, raised the codebase to professional standards, and was widely known for tireless support of users on the WSJT forums. He became a Silent Key in December 2021.

The development team

Today WSJT-X, MAP65, and QMAP are maintained by an international team of volunteers who ship official releases here on GitHub.

  • Joe TaylorK1JT

    Project founder and lead. Original design and code of WSJT, MAP65, WSPR, WSJT-X, and QMAP, and most of their digital modes.

  • Steve FrankeK9AN

    Modes and error-correction coding — WSPR, MSK144, FT8, FT4, FST4/W, and JTTY — and the soft-decision decoder for JT65’s Reed-Solomon code.

  • Brian MoranN9ADG

    Software engineer and former startup CTO; Editor of the ARRL Contest Update. Fox/Hound mode, the UDP interface to external applications, the verification feature, and automated testing and cloud builds.

  • John NelsonG4KLA

    Emeritus Professor of Nuclear Physics, University of Birmingham. EME operator; builds the macOS installers for Intel and Apple Silicon, and tests new code.

  • Charlie SucklingDL3WDG

    Retired RF power-amplifier engineer; EME operator from 1296 MHz to 24 GHz. Alpha testing, code contributions, and the User Guide.

  • Roger RehrW3SZ

    Retired cardiologist. Enjoys coding. Active on 50 MHz thru 24 GHz.

  • Terrell DeppeKJ5HST

    Retired software and embedded systems engineer and entrepreneur — 3D animation, game development, aviation, automotive and industrial automation, and healthcare and life-science analytics. Designed the project’s CI/CD and release workflow.

  • David ChristleKD0BTO

    Physicist (PhD in experimental quantum computing) who works in AI and machine learning. Interests: digital signal processing, statistical inference, coding theory, and high-performance numerical code.

See the Development page to get involved, or the References for the papers behind the codes and modes.

Sources: Wikipedia (WSJT, FT8, WSPR, and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.), the University of Illinois ECE faculty directory, ARRL and RSGB news, and the QST article “Work the World with WSJT-X.”