[3830] RTTY Roundup N5TW M/S LP

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                    ARRL RTTY Roundup

Call: N5TW
Operator(s): KC5YKX, N5TW
Station: N5TW

Class: M/S LP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
   80:   54
   40:  158
   20:  275
   15:  400
   10:   47
------------
Total:  934  State/Prov = 58  Countries = 44  Total Score = 95,268

Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club

Comments:

I had never made a RTTY QSO and Reid (KC5YKX)who was a veteran offered to come
show me the ropes.   Well, he did last years Roundup anyway.  To add to the
excitement of hooking everything up, my new Ten Tec Orion showed up Friday
afternoon. I'd had a week's use on KE5C's Orion so I figured I'm as much a
veteran at it as Reid is to RTTY so we made the decision to use it and just
"Test the dilithium crystals in combat" as they say.   Panicked calls to a
couple of friends netted instructions for setting the Orion filters for AFSK
from KE5C and on setting the audio levels correctly from AC5AA.   AC5AA also did
some on the air listening to double check that we had a nice clean signal.

After hooking things up and initial tests, I did my first QSO with CM2ZK before
the contest.   This was exciting.  Let me digress and tell you of my long
journey in RTTY culminating in this QSO.   At age 14, I was given an old Western
Union Teletype machine by a very nice ham mentor.  This was the old yellow
ribbon machine and I can still smell the hot gun oil smell from that box.   He
showed me a writeup in the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbood on an umpty-ump tube
decoder for driving this from a shortwave radio and I spend alot of lawn mowing
money and used parts he gave me to build the thing - a project way beyond my
limited skills!!!   I know now that the project was hopeless - my Heath GR-91
was nowhere near stable enough for the task if all else was working.   After
many many hours of trouble shooting, I finally got the thing to light the Mark
Space neon bulbs as I tuned in a strong RTTY signal and the teletype sprang to
life!   But the thing generated so much QRN from all the arcing teletype
contacts that after it started up, it drove enough noise back into the radio
that it just kept typing after it would start regardless of the radio's tuning. 
 After many weeks of messing with this, I finally gave up and traded the
teletype off for other things.

So years later, I guess I still had sort of a nervous tick whenever anyone
mentioned RTTY....   And CM2ZK will probably never know why I was so excited
about that QSO!

We had fun and worked hard at the contest with Reid doing most of the work.  
Late Sunday afternoon, we were down to just needing KS and VT for all the states
and Reid was CQing on 10M.   He wanted to go find them but I said he was more
likely to have them call us - sure enough, a KS station calls in.   Reid,
remembering that I'm distantly related to Ethan Alan of Green Mountain fame in
the Revolutionary war said:  "Tom, how about contacting Ethan Alan in the spirit
world and arrange for VT to call us."   "I'm channelling him now", I said.   And
darned if WA1TTL did not call in right there with VT!


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