Well, in between painting my daughter's room, taking son to Karate , a
severe thunder storm warning, power failure, and building a Yagi, I found a
little time to play around in JARTS. I did not get the new antenna up so
worked the contest barefoot into a G5RV. I had 180 Q's for some 40K points,
not in AA5AU territory but I had great fun.
This was my first time in a RTTY contest using Writelog, I opted for
Writelog now that it has the MMTTY plug in. I must say that I was really
amazed at how well things performed. It took a while to decide on a
preferred screen setting, so many weapons to use, so little space to display
on my 15 inch monitor. I opted for the 1024 X 768 display...first time I
have ever used that. I needed my reading glassed but I was really impressed
who how things looked, I kept thinking of how amazed hams from 3-5 years ago
would be at all the tools. Tuning scope, notch filter, band pass filters,
waterfall, and more. All that plus the nifty bandmap feature of Writelog
that nicely kept an eye on who was where on the band.
The ease of capturing the exchange (after a few Writelog regulars explained
it to me) was worth the $$$ I spent, one mouse-click contesting all
weekend. I did discover that where one places the various windows can be
important. A couple of times I miss-clicked and hit the S&P settings at the
bottom of the MMTTY plug-in and finished up QSYing a tad. I lost one QSO as
a result of this.
Everything worked well, none of the MMTTY lock ups that Don reported. None
of the color changes that John WA9ALS noted (John maybe the DL was mobile
and drove into an old GDR zone and it became a new mult). I never did
figure out the timed CQ thingy, will try that before the next contest.
Thanks to Don AA5AU for his site on setting up MMTTY with Writelog. Thanks
to Jorgen, SM6SRW for the plug in and of course thanks to Mako and Wayne for
their software (I even saw Mako in the test but was not able to work him).
Andy KB2EOQ
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