[RTTY] EU1SA SO SB 40M (rather long)

[Vladimir V. Sidorov]

Hi all,

Another single band effort, this time it was 40 m.

400 QSO    1748 pts    248 prefixes    433'504 pts total.  18 hrs on.

Rig: IC-775DSP + IC-PW1
Ant: 2 ele wire beam @45 m for Asia/VK/ZL
        Inv Vee @45 m for other directions

Some observations.
Saturday was quite strange. ZL2AMI worked 2 hrs before sunset (thank you,
Bob, for your patience in copying my exchange!). Then the band turned to be
somewhat full of JA/HL/BY with RST 559-579, but very few of them answered my
calls... I understood what was the reason of that a few hours later. First
RM0A normally constantly heard here at 599+20-40 dB went down to 339 with
drastic Aurora distortions. Then other UA9's followed, and then almost all
of stns were heard like this... So it looks like, the Aurora started even
earlier than I noticed that, and my sigs were already distorted and barely
readable on the Far East. At least I think so. Because of the Aurora I had
to stop on Saturday earlier than planned. What could I do if ED8WPX with his
clearest signal of 599+20 could not copy my exchange for good 3 minutes...
Next day the air was much more clear, but there was not such a DX prop like
on Saturday, though there were some JA and HL.
BTW, the activity of HL stns on RTTY is noticeably rising.

No idea whom to address the following thing, but it's rather disappointing.
A few dozen times I was given an exchange (more or less) like this:
- EU1SA DE DX0DX GA QSL (001) TKS UR 599-002 ...
It was exactly the same macros used by really dozens of stations...
Obviously it is "built-in" into some contest logger, no idea which one, but
it is totally wrong... Maybe somebody know it and can advise respective
people that repeating of a received number can only cause problems...

When the band was empty during the daytime some runs across other bands
brought up YA3R, ZF2NT and 9J2KD on several bands to improve the overall
RTTY score.

Concerning exchanges, I keep 3 of them:
1. <YOURCALL> TU 599-001-001 DE EU1SA
2. <YOURCALL> TU 599-001-001-001 <YOURCALL>
3. <YOURCALL> TU 599-001-001-001-001  001  001 DE EU1SA
The 1st one is used most of the time.
The 2nd one is OK if you run a pile-up and there are several callers on your
freq QRMing to eachother. By sending this exchange you make sure, the
station you call will recognize, the exhange is for him. This exchange can
also be used if somebody is asking for a repeat. In this case you and him
are already sure in eachother's call-signs and the only thing missing is the
exchange.
The 3rd one obviously is for the most complicated cases. I had to push it
some 5-7 times for ZL2AMI ...

In the very end of the contest the latest DX QSO was 9M2/G4ZFE, and the very
last mult logged was GU0...
--- And the call-sign i-i-i-s : ...   !!!

Thank you all for working me. See you next fall.

73,
"Walt", EU1SA