[RTTY] Help needed

[Kok Chen]

On Jan 15, 2011, at 9:05 AM, Bruce Beach wrote:

> Should we use RTTY or PSK31 (or 63)?

Bruce,

In my opinion, it is not even close -- go with PSK31.  (Bear in mind though -- you came to an RTTY reflector to ask :-).

PSK31 has the minimal amounts of "gotchas" that snares beginners.  

BPSK31 is completely independent of sideband (you can use USB and LSB interchangeably and no one knows any better).   Cheap.  Simple.

Most PSK31 software today are user friendly.  They present a panoramic "view" of the spectrum.  You click on a signal and you start decoding his signal.  And when you transmit, you will be "zero beat" automatically on the person.

You won't be at a disadvantage running your new transceiver without an amplifier.  Most people you see on PSK31 run perhaps 50 watts.  Quite often you see people report using less than 25 watts.

For the same amount of power on a quiet band, PSK31 is better at punching through than RTTY.  It is only when there is flutter and bad fading that RTTY will finally come out ahead (at that point, RTTY needs more power to get through fluttery conditions, anyway).

There is much more non-contest activity on PSK31 than on RTTY.  Just tune between 14070 and 17072 kHz on a weekday afternoon and then go watch between 14080 and 14095 kHz.  You can almost never find an RTTY conversation on 40m in the evenings, while you will see many PSK31 transmissions, from pretty much all over the world.

If there are any maladjustments of your transmitter, it is very obvious.  Most PSK31 programs even come with something for others to report your transmitter distortion (IMD) and the other stations can give you a very good indication of any problem.

PSK31 allows use of both upper and lower case characters (and indeed, full European character sets, and a couple of programs (two that I know) even support double-byte Kanji).  Your text comes out natural looking instead of something that comes out looking like it is from... ahhhhhh... a teleprinter.

On the other hand, if your interest is in DX chasing, then RTTY is the preferred mode since most DXpeditions still run RTTY for their digital mode operation.  But for friendly day-to-day, keyboard-to-keyboard chats, PSK31 is much more common on the bands.

PSK31 transmission only occupies a 50 Hz sliver of the band.  An RTTY signal require 7 times as much footprint. (Most RTTY signals require a separation of 8 to 10 times more, actually).

73
Chen, W7AY