[RTTY] K or carriage return

[Al Kozakiewicz]

It's not controversial.  It's the obsession that accompanies part of the conversation that some of us (well, me anyway) find amusing.  A number of stations that called me over the weekend when I was running a frequency sent only the serial number one time.  Despite the fact that that isn't a valid exchange under the rules of the contest as it's missing the RST, it's ignorant of the nature of non error correcting, non parity serial character encoding.  Even S9 signals can drop bits that appear to be perfectly valid characters IN CONTEXT (e.g. a 7 turns into an 8 and vice versa with a single bit error).  But, hey, it was very efficient from a character conservation standpoint.

And despite my playfulness on the subject, I add a space character to the end of my transmission specifically because I know the last bits are the most likely to be dropped.

Al
AB2ZY

________________________________________
From: rtty-bounces at contesting.com [rtty-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Peter Laws [plaws at plaws.net]
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2011 12:39 PM
To: RTTY contest group
Subject: Re: [RTTY] K or carriage return

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 09:24, w6otc at garlic.com <w6otc at garlic.com> wrote:
> Reply:  CQWW RTTY, Sept. 2010, P49X (W0YK) claimed 5024 QSOs as SOAB HP.At
> 100+/hr for 48 hrs, seconds begin to look significant.


I still don't get why the issue of making your own macros as efficient
as possible is a controversial topic.  Why *wouldn't* you want to be
efficient?  As seen above, seconds mean QSOs and for some stations,
that's the whole point.  It is a contest, after all.

Even if you're not going to win (I'm not!), wouldn't common courtesy
dictate that you respect those who are and work to make your own QSOs
as efficient as possible?

In the case of adding a char to the end of your macros, these spaces
are not superfluous, they are critical to efficiently conveying your
message.  As noted, you can skip extra chars at the end, but then your
message doesn't get through as quickly many times.

I used to have a CR at the end of my macros until someone here pointed
out the fact that you are making the other operator "chase you" up the
screen.  Now they all have spaces (or should have).  I think three is
probably two too many, but I'll listen evidence that it's not.


--
Peter Laws | N5UWY | plaws plaws net | Travel by Train!
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