[RTTY] RTTY Scores - a digression

[Richard Ferch]

For what it's worth, at least one of the comments that showed up in the 3830
scores but not here (yet) is something I think is worth noting.

A couple of folks said in the comments in their 3830 submissions that they
wished people would end their messages with a carriage return. Personally, I
don't care whether it's a carriage return or some other way to put
whitespace in, but I definitely agree that you should do something to ensure
there is a space after your call sign. I think terminating a message with
your call sign without any trailing space is less than optimal, for the
following reason:

Look at it from the S&Per's side. You end a QSO and send QRZ XY0Z ending the
message right there. Yes, that's the shortest message you can send, saving
you a fraction of a second every time you send it, and yes, those fractions
do add up. However: if the band is noisy (and it's always noisy during a
contest) what he sees is QRZ XY0ZQJVH5467$&*!. His software won't pick up a
callsign out of that automatically, and if he tries to enter it manually he
doesn't know where to stop typing (is it XY0Z or XY0ZQJ?). If the band is
hopping, he may just tune on to find someone whose callsign is in the clear,
and you just lost a possible QSO. If the band is slow, he may sit and wait
for you to send a CQ. He is gambling that you will probably send CQ DE XY0Z
XY0Z and regardless of what happens to the second XY0Z (you ended it without
a space too, right?) there's a reasonable chance the first one is in the
clear, his software can pick it up automatically, and away you both go.
Meanwhile, you have both lost around 10 or 15 seconds. Just by sticking some
kind of whitespace on the end of your QRZ message, you can avoid all that.

In other words, cutting the trailing space off your message to save a
fraction of a second per QSO can actually cost you 10-15 seconds per QSO (or
heck, even if it's only a few QSOs out of every hundred, that's still too
many, as you can see if you do the math). What's far worse, it costs the
S&Per 10-15 seconds too, and it's not his fault.

Even more annoying from the S&Per's point of view is when you turn out after
all that to be a dupe which his software was unable to recognize until your
call sign finally appeared in the clear. If this happens often enough, he
may just adopt a policy of always tuning on whenever he encounters a message
like that, and you'll be lucky if he ever works you. Somehow I doubt that
the intent of shortening your message was to cut yourself off from a whole
group of possible QSO partners, but that could be the end result!

Far-fetched? I'll let you be the judge of that. Does it apply only to
messages from a running station? No, if you think about it the same kind of
analysis can be applied to messages from the S&P station too, with similar
conclusions.

Anyway, as a general principle it does pay to design your messages from the
point of view of the person receiving them rather than the person sending
them, and this is a particularly good example.

End of rant.

I hope you all had a good time in the contest, and hope to see you all in
the next one, jobs, family commitments, equipment failures and propagation
permitting.

73,
Rich VE3IAY <space> ;-)