[RTTY] CR or QRZ: Seconds vs Minutes

[Kok Chen]

On Jan 12, 2011, at 12:46 PM, Ktfrog007 at aol.com wrote:

> The friendliest I've ever been was in my running  macro:  W6XXX TU 73 AB1J QRZ which I've changed to  TU W6XXX AB1J CQ
> Dropping the 73 may speed me up, but it doesn't make me a better person.  ;-))

IMHO, neither does it make you a better contest op.   You will also be surprised that it does not matter for the real big guns.  

In all the modes.

Guys like K3ZO (phone), N5KO/HC8N (CW) and AA5AU (RTTY) often send me a hello on the side, and you can go look at the "damage" it does to their scores.

If you are good, you are good, period.  

If you aspire to be good, just follow what the actual good ones do.  If you are like me and just want to waste away a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, well OK, do anything you want :-).

On phone, K3ZO even sends his greetings to me in Thai, and I would utter back a "korb khun krab, khun Fred."  Just a few seconds, but it does wonders for FCC Part 97.1(e).  OK, so both of us are Americans, but there could be some HS station listening, and both of us had fun :-).  But think what damage it does to his run rhythm.  If you watch/listen to the rhythm of these good ops, they appear completely relaxed.  Fred, by the way is pretty good switching to Spanish too.  There is a YouTube video showing Fred in a QSO in Spanish.

I am sure being friendly does not hurt their Mult count one bit.  The next time that ZD7 tunes around in a contest, guess who he is willing to wait in a queue for, a person who treated him as cannon fodder the last time, or a person who spent the time to thank him for a mult?  

I actually have an alternate macro set when ending a QSO with a Japanese station (didn't use it this time since I didn't issue any CQ) where the keyboard macro that sends the "TU" message actually sends "domo arigato gozaimashita" when I also hold down the control key.  I don't even shorten it to the "domo" that JA stations send to one another when they are in a rush.  Really eats into my time I know.  Ask me if I care.  You can try that instead of shortening your exchanges to see if the next time you call CQ, whether you get more responses from JA in the future.

I always make it a point of going out of my way to give certain people a QSO even though I know it not won't make a difference for them; someone else will fill in the time slot I take up and Oregon isn't exactly what you'd call a rare mult.  But, it is just.... ummm... the friendliness part of it.  If I tune across Don and he is marginally printing, I would jot his frequency down so I can find him again later.  Unfair to others?  So sue me.  Life is full of subjective choices.  And we all make them even when we play around in an RTTY contest.

Just think about it when you try to make your exchanges too surgical.  Especially if you are not yet at the top of the ladder so those couple of QSOs that are talked about won't matter anyway.  Might as well collect your karma points now on the way to the pinnacle, or you might never get there.

73
Chen, W7AY