I'll try to clarify my earlier comment.
Why sending faster helped me at the noisy VK9ML QTH:
-- In between a pair of static crashes, I had a part of
a second or maybe 1-2 seconds to get a piece of a call. If
the station sent slowly, I would only hear a couple of
dot/dash elements. If the station sent faster, I could get
at least a letter and some part of the letters surrounding
it. That gave me a handle on something I could ask for:
"8?", for example, knowing that I heard a dash ending the
character before the "8" and a dot+dash at the start of the
character after the "8". So my next transmission would be
"8? 8?"
-- The other station repeats his call several times.
With random luck, other parts of the call get revealed.
Somtimes the other parts don't fit with anything I know yet;
just hearing two consecutive dots, for example. But I might
hear the end of the "8" again and a clear "J" on the next
attempt, or the next, or the next after that... so now I can
ask "8J?" as a speculative fit. [Of course, in this
example, it might be "BJ" from another part of the call...
but if I am hearing the station pause between repetitions of
his callsign, and he is sending his call over and over again
at an even pace, I have a good sense of where in the call he
is sending when the static crashes pause. He might send his
call 3 times, and I would just send "8? 8?" again to get him
to try another attempt, and he sends that call 3 times, and
I keep feeding him the pieces that I know.]
-- After enough repeats, all of the piece parts can be
assembled into a consistent and whole callsign to offer for
confirmation along with a report. Sometimes this took as
much as 5 minutes to complete a QSO on really bad nights.
But some QSOs were better than turning the radio off.
It's a kind of mental integration of many repetitions of the
callsign...
The above works if the pileup is reasonably disciplined, the
responding stations are reasonably loud (i.e., can be copied
between most crashes), the responding signals are not
fluttery, and I am sufficiently persistent (and awake!).
Under these conditions 25-30 WPM might be just the right
speed to be using... and that's what I would try to send at,
in order to encourage responses in that range.
Sometimes stations slowed down when they heard me struggling
with their callsign... which was a recipe for failure. I
would never get enough code elements at 15-20 wpm to put
anything together.
Of course this doesn't work under other conditions; e.g.,
weak, watery signals on a relatively quiet band. So, at
another time, slower speeds are better... and I should send
slower to encourage slow responses.
It's all part of the toolkit.
_______________________________________________
Topband mailing list
Topband@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/topband
|