Comment by wkat4242

Agreed but if you're trapped in a war zone, time is one thing you have. And equipment for FT8 is simple to build yourself. It's also very difficult to trace. And you can take up some fields used for other stuff and convert them to data (like the sender). This would be illegal on amateur bands since it's required to identify oneself but again in a war situation this is less relevant since any covert communication will probably be forbidden anyway.

You do need a time source though. GPS is generally used for that but it doesn't need to be extremely accurate with FT-8 like with some other protocols.

I would imagine using it for a regular "I'm ok" message for the home front in such a situation using pre-arranged contents.