RTTY is also a "sound card" mode using AFSK. See fldigi. It is point
and click. Yes, with a FSK TX, you need to tune. fldigi operates
multi-mode and includes PSK and RTTY... "so" any club running PSK (with
fldigi) should be able to switch modes to RTTY. At FD, most would be AFSK.
When I was active with NAVY MARS 20+ years ago, all traffic into our
area was RTTY at 100wpm. They were just starting to use auto-correcting
modes, but the non-correcting mode worked. (Navy MARS is no longer).
73, steve WB3LGC
On 2/24/2017 9:58 AM, Dave Barr wrote:
Tim, it's a fine idea to encourage more use of RTTY during FD, but I
think there is a basic problem that will be difficult to overcome.
PSK is an easier mode for non-digital types to operate compared to
RTTY. PSK is a point and click mode, where RTTY in most cases
requires fairly accurate manual tuning. RTTY is certainly superior to
PSK as a contest mode in regard to speed of qsos and resilience under
widely varying signal levels and qrm.
Non-contest usage of the various digital modes shows PSK to be more
popular than RTTY as a result of it's ease-of-use, but so are the JT
modes, the timing and structure of which certainly do not encourage
high contest efficiency.
RTTY uses wider band segments because we tune through them, whereas
PSK segments are primarily limited by RX/TX bandpass widths, so an
expanded segment would be somewhat more difficult to use as
efficiently as RTTY.
While I believe a primary difficulty in expanding Field Day RTTY usage
is PSK's operating facility, I also think the competition for both
RTTY and PSK air time vs the phone and cw favoring operators may be
more important. Perhaps the diminishing percentage of cw capable
operators will open more opportunity for digital activity. We need to
mentor more potential Field Day ops to feel as comfortable with RTTY
as they are with PSK, or phone for that matter. And of course we
should also be mentoring the more recently ticketed hams in becoming
cw proficient.
73, Dave, K2YG
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