[RTTY] I had a reply in the contest from a fellow using cw forrtty

[Bill Turner]

ORIGINAL MESSAGE: 
On Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:22:00 -0900, AL9A wrote:

>Several characters, pause, some 
>more characters, pause then a few more, pause. 

REPLY: 

I didn't hear the station this weekend, but another thing this might be is
that the sending station had diddles turned off. What you would hear is a
steady tone, then a burst of some characters, then a steady tone again. 

I haven't heard that on the air in a long time but it used to be common. 

Back in the '90s Brian Beezley, author of RiTTY by K6STI, published a paper
arguing in favor of having diddles turned on because it allows a decoder to
keep "sync" when no actual characters were being sent. It also allows the
use of Automatic Threshold Control (ATC), which MMTTY has a button for. It
caught on and now you almost never hear a non-diddle signal. 

Brian called it the "numerical flywheel", which is a very descriptive name
for it. 

I still have a copy of Brian's document. If you'd like a copy, let me know.
It is three pages in Word .doc format. 

Bill, W6WRT