I've been wrestling with how to really evaluate 2Tone and concluded that the
only valid way is to have it fully integrated with the contest logger and
test it under fire in major RTTY contests. Since the only competitive RTTY
contest logger that runs 2Tone right now is N1MM Logger, I once again
attempted to climb its learning after giving up four years ago.
Leading up to the CQ WPX RTTT Contest, I got into every RTTY contest using
N1MM Logger with MMTTY, DXP38 and 2Tone in parallel. 5-10% of the time one
of the three copied clearly while the other two did not. In BARTG, each was
best about the same amount of those times. Of course 90-95% of the time all
three copied perfect and the same. In FMRE, 2Tone was best far more often.
This was from my CA QTH which is very different than Aruba, so I was eager
to see how the three decoders compared in the pileups down here.
First some background. I needed more than just to "run N1MM Logger". I
needed three networked PCs with SO2V running on each of two of them, i.e.,
SO4V. On each radio PC, 3-4 decoders ran on the main receiver audio stream
and a single instance of MMTTY ran on the sub-receiver audio. The third PC
had no radio, but ran CC-Cluster and kept a third copy of the log. Callsign
stacking had to work flawlessly on the two radio PCs, along with ESM and a
number key remappings. There are more details but that gives a notion of
the complexity that I run with WriteLog and needed to carry through to the
N1MM Logger configuration.
It seemed like I was making progress balancing all this complexity and
learning the idiosyncrasies of N1MM Logger. During FMRE, the weekend prior
to WPX RTTY, I had pretty good confidence that all this would work good
enough. However, as I evolved through the next week, I kept running into
unacceptable issues that I couldn't resolve well enough. By late Thursday
night I got cold feet and bailed. Friday morning I moved everything back to
WriteLog. As Don AA5AU and I discussed on Thursday, I had to think about
whether I wanted to risk having a weekend of software application issues, as
compared to having fun contesting with WriteLog and its higher probability
(for me) of running smoothly. I greatly regretted giving up 2Tone but I
feel it was the right decision for last weekend. WriteLog ran the
configuration described above perfectly. There were no glitches other than
the usual operator QLFs. 2Tone would have increased my rate by reducing the
number of repeats and allowing me to get more callsigns quicker.
I have to say that K8UT, N2AMG, K6LL, W6SX and others were extremely
supportive as I struggled to re-learn and configure N1MM Logger for my RTTY
configuration. It is the most used logger by far in the CQ RTTY contests
based on logs submitted. A lot of top contesters use the program and many
of them use a lot of the advanced features. So, there is plenty of evidence
that it should be able to measure up to the task.
I plan to continue evaluating the feasibility of running N1MM Logger, only
because 2Tone is not available for WriteLog. 2Tone is the sole reason I am
considering using N1MM Logger.
Ed P49X (W0YK)
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Joe W4TV wrote;
It's not likely that 2Tone can be used with Writelog. 2Tone emulates
the XMMT.ocx interface for MMTTY while the current MMTTY plug-in uses
the original shared memory interface in MMTTY.exe. Using 2Tone would
require a completely new "plug-in" for WriteLog.
On 2/12/2013 8:27 AM, Steve AI9T wrote:
> Anyone figured out how to run 2Tone with Writelog yet?? It would be a
> nice addition.
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