[RTTY] J'Accuse - RTTY RU

[Steve Holton]

I thoroughly enjoyed the Roundup, but frankly was rather appalled at some 
of what I saw during the contest!
Some pretty sloppy practices to the point of skirting/not following the 
rules were observed. Based of some of what I observed I suspect that the 
log checking will bounce a lot of QSOs.

There has been a lot of discussion dancing around how few characters need 
to be sent to make QSOs faster.....
Skip the ? in QSL? or QRZ?
To shift or not to shift on space
etc...
But I don't think it should include not bothering to send the complete 
exhange.....

I don't consider this to be a valid exchange:
PA BK      or a very generous    FL FL BK
or
0123 BK    or     971 971 BK
Though they seemed to be quite a popular forms to use.

So I saw lots of exchanges like this:
AB1CD QRZ
     DE  N1NB N1NB BK
VT BK
     AB1CD 599 CT CT de N1NB
TU QRZ

Doesn't give you a high degree of confidence that both parties were 
actually talking to each other.

Nor does it really seem to conform to the rules.... to wit:
             General Rules for All ARRL Contests
3.2. All call signs and exchange information must be sent, received, 
acknowledged
and logged correctly by each station for a complete QSO.

In the example above AB1CD  (a call carefully constructed to hide the 
guilty  HI HI) never sent/acknowledged my call nor bothered with the 
perfunctory 599 signal report!

In clear conditions you can get a sense of the above as to whether it was 
real QSO or not, but in crowded conditions it's more of a crap shoot.

This was pointed out by some ops who very nicely acknowledge your exchange 
with something like this:
AB1CD TU FER CT DE XY1ZZ QRZ?
But In watching some of these exchanges AB1CD  sent VT and  WX6YZ offered 
the exchange with CT as the state neither including any call signs nor 
coming back on seeing the acknowledgement in error leaving port XY1ZZ with 
an invalid QSO.

I also had a several stations come back worked before. Usually If I look at 
the log I see that I picked up a call earlier that printed on letter off 
and was so logged or I was simply charging ahead without looking at the 
entry window showing it a dupe. This was not the case at all as I examined 
my log. Based on the above you can see that it is quite possible they 
logged a QSO that really never existed at all or was so doubtful I didn't 
even consider logging it.

By Sunday, I even observed, when working someone I worked before on another 
band, that the station didn't even bother to wait for my exchange...
AB1CD QRZ
     DE  N1NB N1NB BK
VT BK
TU QRZ.
Heck he "knew" what my exchange would have been why wait??

I also observed that the first character or two getting "swallowed". Some 
of this I suspect is from turnaround times from xmit to rcv. I suspect that 
soundcard-rig interfaces may have some timing factors that exacerbate the 
problem. But putting a return or space in from of message buffers can't 
slow you down that much!
For those kind enough to include my call I'd still see something like...
1PC1NB ME ME BK   or AB,31NB PA PA BK   or  XF!EQNB VT VT BK  or  even 
XVCFB 123 BK
which range from likely to who knows as to whether the Op is coming back to me.
In some cases it may be turnaround on my end but in others it clearly wasn't.

What would happen if folks started sending Signal reports other than 599 - 
say a random mix. Or, say, operating portable from several states during a 
contest (I not sure this is legal) but having the state/section/zone change 
during the test would trip up a lot of folks on the second day!

Folks we can do better.
That's my 2 cents...
73 Steve N1NB