I'm a CW contester, OK?
I hate SSB and especially SSB contesting, OK?
I'm also a moron, here's my pitiful story:
I had some fabulous 'me time' (unemployed engineer) so
I configured my full-blown SO2R setup for SSB
contesting. It was really fun, setting it all up and
making little interface boxes with transformers and
getting it working and recording .wav files and all
that stuff. Except I don't think there are nearly
enough function keys for SSB to send pre-recorded
strings.
My Brilliant Idea was to record whole phrases like you
might have to say in a real contest like "is this
frequency in use?" and "please repeat your section"
and to name them 00.wav, 01.wav, 02.wav, etc. I
programmed one of the function keys to speak whatever
was in the callsign box at that time, normally the
other guy's call. If I typed in '01' it would go find
'01.wav' and say that phrase. '01' doesn't appear in
any legit callsign in a domestic contest and rarely in
a DX contest anyway.
Ooooh, I spent days and days and days planning,
recording and processing .wav files, it was really
great. The goal: to never say a word into the mic the
entire contest.
Sooooo...... SSB SS started and I was whipping them
out on 10m.
UNTIL MY OUTGOING NUMBER WAS 10. (did you see this
coming?)
Then it said:
"W4KFC, number THIS FREQUENCY IS IN USE B N4SL 72 WWA"
oh. It saw the 10.wav and spoke it instead of saying
"one zero"
My wife bet me I wouldn't last an hour, I lasted 11
minutes. I owe her sushi tonight.
So, I know I'm not the only fool to try this but maybe
I'm the only fool to actually get into the contest
with it and discover the failure. Back to CW.
We really need more SSB strings, may I suggest some
alternate keystroke method of recording strings so we
can use the Shift-F to get at another set of messeges
like in CW? May I even suggest three banks of them?
73, Steve N4SL Machias, WA CN88xa
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