[RTTY] beyond optimization ?

[Jeff Blaine AC0C]

Funny story - I worked one guy toward the end.  He had his callsign in a 
macro that was overly optimized for speed.  Meaning there was not a space or 
anything between his calls.  And it was one of these newer callsigns where 
you are not sure what the lettering is in the traditional sense.

SO the reply for NF1V (not the actual call, sorry NF1V) looked like F1VNF1V 
or something.  With the QSB on 80, it took 3 resends before I could tell 
what his call was.

Maybe he had a non-printing character in there and my terminal ignored it 
rather than just mapping it to a space.  Hard to know...  But drove me nuts 
as the final minutes ticked down.  Suppose the massive amounts of coffee and 
limited sleep had something to do with it as well...

My thought is that there should be a balance in these exchanges - where we 
should provide enough initial redundancy to avoid unneeded repeats - I had 
to hit quite a few guys for a repeat because they sent all their info one 
time only.  It seems to me that the time wasted in resends, or waiting for 
the guy to try to decipher your decode with the noise/qrm/qrn can work 
against you in the long run.

Of course, if you are running a 5-element monoband at 120' with a KW, you 
probably won't get many repeat requests.  The other guy can probably hear 
you well and you him.  But each of us really needs to consider just how much 
of a flame we are throwing - because there are too many guys trying to make 
it go with a single itteration of data, when upon hitting their QRZ page 
featuring the 100W + G5RV @ 30', one can guess why their signal is hard to 
decode in one go-around.

Call it rookie frustration.  :)  Happy New Year to everyone.

73/jeff/ac0c