[RTTY] Dashes in Contest Reports

[Jim Reisert AD1C]

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Bill, W6WRT <dezrat1242 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> What Chen ignores is the case where the FIGS shift character before
> the 599 is lost or garbled. When that happens and the dash is present,
> the receiving station will print TOOAE. If the dash were NOT present
> and USOS was enabled as it should be, under the same conditions  the
> receiving station would print TOO 3.
>
> So which is better, TOOAE or TOO 3? To me, the choice is obvious.

Bill, what you don't seem to get, and which Chen has argued in the
past, is that the error WILL NOT necessarily occur on the first FIGS.
Your solution is to transmit MORE FIGS/LTRS characters, all of which
have as likely a chance of being corrupted as the first one.

MTBF, or mean time between/before failure, is a fixed quantity.  When
you INCREASE the number of transmitted characters, the MTBF stays the
same, but the likelihood of experiencing a failure INCREASES.

I'm with Chen on this one.  Send the MINIMUM number of characters
required, and you'll minimize the absolute number of errors.

73 - Jim AD1C

-- 
Jim Reisert AD1C, <jjreisert at alum.mit.edu>, http://www.ad1c.us