[CQ-Contest] ARRL RTTY Roundup "assisted" class

[Shoppa, Tim]

CW Skimming is very effective right now; I can almost always get a higher rate in the first half of a CW test, if I click and work spots rather than CQ'ing. Only after that slows down do I switch to CQ'ing with a little bit of venturing off to work new spots during slow times. It has taken me several years of use to get to the level of discipline where I used CW skimming very fruitfully in WAE CW 2013.

RTTY skimming has advanced a lot in the past year, I have used telnet clusters that show DL4RCK skimmer spots in several tests (and also not used it in other tests.) There are only a handful (two? three?) DL4RCK skimmers active out there.

I do not feel that RTTY Skimming has yet advanced to that point where it helps my raw rate in the same way as CW skimming. There aren't that many skimmers and their coverage does not feel nearly as complete as CW skimmer's.

With any of the skimming, using it with discipline is the only way you will end up improving your total number of Q's. Discipline for both CW and RTTY, means for me, knowing to mark for later if the QSO is in a bad phase, and coming back later when it is in a good phase. I can kinda set my own little mental timer to come back when the Q should be wrapping up.

I always wanted to use my own multichannel decoder to help pick the next Q in a good phase in a RTTY test, but my own attempts at home multichannel decoding have not been very useful. Previous attempts at my own multichannel decoding usually last about 5 minutes into the contest when I decide it's stupid to try to keep the bandwidth so wide with such a variation in dynamic ranges out there.

Tim N3QE