[RTTY] USOS Question

[Richard Ferch]

keepwalking188 at yahoo.com wrote:
> The discussion has centered around dash vs. Space. So let me ask
 > at the risk of offending those who already know everything there
 > is to know -  would any of the other seperators (comma?) offer
 > a performance advantage vs the dash/space options?
>

No; in fact there could even be a performance disadvantage, at least at 
the receiving end. The advantage of using a dash is that it sometimes 
avoids the need for an extra {FIGS} character that would be inserted by 
transmit USOS after a space. Other punctuation would be the same, EXCEPT 
that some (most?) current RTTY software recognizes the possibility of a 
dash as a separator, but not necessarily of other punctuation. For 
example, a comma might not be recognized by the receiving software as an 
exchange separator, in which case the station receiving an exchange 
separated using commas might have to enter the exchange by hand instead 
of being able to click on it. That could cost you time while you wait 
for him to finish typing and start sending back to you.

> Also - the usos discussion is excellent. And it got me to thinking
 > that running two decoders - one with usos and one without - may
 > offer an overall improvement with a glance between the two when
 > times are tough.
>

Yes. N1MM Logger, for example, allows the use of up to six receive 
windows distributed amongst one or two receivers. You could certainly 
set up parallel windows with receive USOS on in one and off in another. 
Whether this would be worth the screen space it would take up is another 
question, of course!

73,
Rich VE3KI


> Richard Ferch wrote:
>> W6WRT wrote:
>>> that brings up a question: What would be the advantage to turning
>>> USOS off for RX but not for TX? Especially in the context of the dash
>>> debate, receiving dashes defeats USOS anyway, so under what
>>> circumstances would it be advantageous to turn it off for RX?
>> If you were working a station that was not using USOS on transmit and 
>> who was not using dashes, you might want to turn USOS off on receive. 
>> For example you receive 599 QZE XCE with a couple of noise bursts, you 
>> ask for a repeat, and maybe you'd rather be able to copy the repeat as 
>> 599 -?3 12/ to eliminate one of the sources of confusion. With most 
>> modern software this probably isn't much of an issue, i.e. you can 
>> achieve the same objective by switching the case after the text has been 
>> received, but having a button on the front panel of the program gives 
>> you one more option.
>> 73,
>> Rich VE3KI
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