[RTTY] Pet Peeve

[Jerry Flanders]

At 23:00 10/18/04, Richard Ferch wrote:
><snip>
>
>I agree with you that a space may be preferable at the beginning of a 
>message because of the additional beneficial effect using USOS. But at the 
>trailing end of a message is a different story. A call sign sent with no 
>trailing spaces often ends up on my screen as W4UKASDFGHJKL or some such 
>mess, and not only can I not mouse click on it, I can't even figure out 
>whether it's a 1x2 or a 1x3 call (well, in that particular case I can, but 
>you know what I mean). And unfortunately I believe that some popular 
>software actually ignores trailing spaces in buffers, so just putting them 
>into your messages does not ensure that they actually get sent.

I agree that a separator at the end of a buffer is needed. I also have 
spaces at the end of all my buffers to make sure my text is clear. They are 
sent by WL. I would never have guessed that software would strip out any 
trailing spaces. Maybe so in a CW macro, but not RTTY. Can you tell us 
which programs would strip them? Should be easy to check this - just put 
one char at the front of a long macro of spaces and see what happens when 
you send it.

One effect of using spaces at both the start and end of my macros makes for 
double spaces sent in the string when I hook macros together on the air. It 
would be nice if I could avoid this, but don't see how to. My callsign 
macro is a single W4UK with spaces at each end, and I just hit the Fkey as 
many times as conditions require. I send extra spaces doing this, but since 
my call is short, I don't worry too much about it.

Jerry W4UK