[RTTY] [CQ-Contest] RTTY contest software

[Bill Turner]

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

On Sat, 21 Oct 2006 08:09:14 +0100, Ian White GM3SEK
<gm3sek at ifwtech.co.uk> wrote:

>As Ed and many other people have found, all decent decoders give the 
>same copy most of the time.


------------ REPLY FOLLOWS ------------

With the emphasis on "most of the time", that is quite true. If one is
serious about contesting or DXing for that matter, one should try to
get closer to "100% perfect copy". There ARE significant differences
between RTTY demodulators, especially for digging weak signals out of
the noise. I've tested lots of them in parallel with each other and
the two best I've found are RITTY by K6STI (soundcard) and the HAL
ST-8000 (hardware TNC). Neither one is cheap, but they beat all the
others by a noticeable margin, and are essentially a dead even match
against each other.

A close second, and very good indeed, is MMTTY. As a rough guess, in a
contest where you make 1000 QSOs, you might lose one or two by not
using one of the two listed above. Not a big deal, unless you lose
first place by one or two QSOs. :-)

Bill, W6WRT