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Re: [RTTY] More on the KH6ZM mystery

To: RTTY Reflector <RTTY@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [RTTY] More on the KH6ZM mystery
From: Kok Chen <chen@mac.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 20:39:16 -0800
List-post: <rtty@contesting.com">mailto:rtty@contesting.com>
Gotcha!

As a last resort, I took a look at the waveforms :-).

Very clean signal, as I told Alex in an email earlier.  In the recording the 
KH6ZM had almost 20 dB SNR in the noise bandwidth that Alex uses. (I can only 
wish I have a receiving antenna like that!)

I can see that KH6ZM used 1.5 stop bits.  And the "Z" of KH6ZM was clearly 
there, every single bit [sic] of it.

And then it gets interesting...  

He sends a start bit followed by 2 more zeros for the least significant bits, 
then followed by 1.86 bits of ones.  And then cuts off.

So he was basically sending ?1100 and no stop bit, instead of 11100.   
(Remember, least significant bit gets transmitted first -- typical of UARTS.)

He is chopping off his stop bit and 1.14 of his data bits.

I do see some low level signals afterwards, but too low inside the noise floor 
of the sound file (Alex' recording was down 25 dB from full scale sound card 
level).  It is possible that the west coast is hearing his barefoot signal 
after his linear turned off too early, and the east coast could have copied him 
if they had matched the sound card gain to the signal.   Maybe.  

I don't use amplifiers, do people sequence their amps this way for RTTY?

Anyway, people should at least copy him as KH6Z (but not as "KH6M") since the 
entire Z was cleanly transmitted.  But the last character is definitely ill 
formed.

The ARRL contest robot is going to have lots of fun with this one :-).  I 
wonder if it gives points to one or both sides if the call is incorrectly 
copied at one end.  Personally, I would give credit to everyone who copied him 
as KH6Z* where * is anything including null, since that is what I see in Alex' 
sound file.  Unfortunately, the robot don't look at sound files and you have to 
log what you copied.

73
Chen, W7AY







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