Reposting my comments from 3830
I may be in a minority here but I really enjoyed it. Overall rate wasn't
great
(a bit less than 30 per hour for close to 8 hours) but..a gigantic CME hit
about
halfway through my second hour. I did manage a 80 per hour rate for a bit,
and
that was with only one radio, and using the base WSJT-X for logging. I
wasn't
able to get the N1MM+ integration working before the contest, so no SO2R
(not
that it would have mattered much, 20M was pretty much it.) What I found
interesting is that, during the CME (K at 5, A at 36), I was still able to
work
stations, even some EU on 20M). There is *no way* this would have been
possible
with RTTY (huge flutter and *very* weak rx, I cant even imagine how much
weaker
going the other way with absorption that high.) The way I see it is, with
SO2R
working, a rate in the 120Q per hour area should be feasible. What would
make
it a lot better would be to find someway to add a "Now" packet, which
would make stacking possible. Do that and you could get even higher rates.
This is going to be big.
73
Steve KL7SB
-----Original Message-----
From: CQ-Contest [mailto:cq-contest-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of
n6ar@earthlink.net
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2019 9:40 AM
To: cq-contest@contesting.com
Subject: [CQ-Contest] WWDIGI TEST
Guys,
Worked the WW DIGI Contest this weekend. It was a lot different contest than
I envisioned. Hardly any FT8 contest activity except on 80, where for some
reason the designated FT4 segment was empty. Plenty of FT8 activity; but
most of it was non-contest. Not enough Europeans and DX in the contest, and
W's were covering up the ones that were there. We needed an alternate 3 kHz
band segment.
The software still needs lots of work too. Not enough direction about which
module to use- VHF NA or just regular FT4/FT8. Neither really work that well
for a contest. The built in WSTJ ADIF file creator is very primitive and
cumbersome. Glad one can use the com option to log directly into N1MM. Too
bad WSTJ doesn't support an ability to respond to multiple stations at once
for contesters. I found it hard to deal with guys that would call once, and
then disappear even when you responded to them the first time, only to pop
up again in the middle of someone else's QSO. The program didn't always find
the grid square even when it was there. The program would regress to an
earlier line in the protocol if someone worked another station in parallel
with you. This happened over and over slowing things down. The signal
reports are for some reason are actually stronger for me on FT4 than FT8.
That said, I could watch the screen waterfall many times and see someone was
responding, but no decode. This was particularly true of guys responding to
me off my frequency, so it wasn't multiple folks calling on my frequency
that were confusing the decoder.
The program picked the first decode for auto respond during CQs. It was
frustrating to see it answer a W9 when a 3 point G or DL was calling. Yet if
you don't check the respond to first button, there just isn't enough tome to
do it manually. Just a lot of need for improvement.
Even though FT4 is twice as fast as FT8, I found it hard to get to 60 an
hour for all the reasons I mentioned above. I am a skeptic about those guys
with 500+ QSOs in the log. I strongly suspect walkaway robots on multiple
bands using the SO2R excuse.
I had lots of work to do for Hurricane Prep, so I could only afford 10
hours. But I sure hope some improvements are made.
Larry Brockman, N6AR
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