[RTTY] WPX suggestion

[Kok Chen]

On Feb 8, 2013, at 8:59 AM, Bill Turner wrote:

> W6WRT TOO 001 001
> 
> By now, everyone should know what TOO means, so the exchange is clear. 

Someone who knows what "TOO" means should also know how to decode "PPQ" into 001 by sight.  

And this does not even take into account software which can do the conversion between FIGS and LTRS for you without your need to check the QWERTY keyboard.

Shifts should not even be a problem in a contest (but exchange length might bother some people).

Your example also assumes that one particular spot for the error to occur (single failure point).  Given the structure of your exchange, the probability of an error occurring at any other position other than the dash (or figs) is much higher than at the dash (or figs) themselves.  Those errors will require a repeat, for both the space and the dash case; neither has an advantage.  

If you really want to shave milliseconds, this is the obvious place to shave it, Bill.

It comes down to how often you are asked to repeat vs. how short your exchange is.  Duplicating the exchange three times will cause even fewer repeats, but is not worth it, as most people found out, since the number of times you have to repeat is so small (unless the signal is crossing the pole, or less often, the equator).  

In the end, the demodulator has a much bigger influence on the print that anything else -- N1MM users who switch from MMTTY to 2Tone will gradually fins out.   I would worry about that before I worry about spaces and dashes.

By the way, if you have not updated 2Tone since about Christmas time, be sure to do so before this contest.  The old version had some bugs (one has to do with a very common number of stop bits that people use), and also had a compromise on filters which ended up throwing lots of errors when there is multipath.

73
Chen, W7AY