[RTTY] RTTY Newbie Questions

[Al Kozakiewicz]

My comments below...

________________________________________
From: RTTY [rtty-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of Eric Rosenberg [ericrosenberg.dc at gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, January 07, 2013 9:20 PM
To: rtty at contesting.com
Cc: Barry N1EU; Shoppa, Tim; Jim Brown K9YC
Subject: [RTTY] RTTY Newbie Questions

I was in the RU for a short time this weekend, my first RTTY contest in
my 40 years being licensed.  My station is a Ten Tec Orion 565with lots
of filters(2.4, 1.8, 500) running v3.030 firmware and the latest version
of Writelog.

I learned alot, but have even more questions.

1- what's the normal bandwidth to use? I left it between 1500 and 2 kHz,
not knowing any better.

**
Icom has a RTTY filter.  It's about 250hz wide.  With it on, you can park very close to adjacent stations and never know they are there.  The key thing is to make your pre-AGC filters narrow enough so that there is no AGC action as the result of adjacent signals.  Trying to filter the audio is, IMO, a waste of time in most circumstances.
**

2- How does one monitor their own (FSK) signal to see how good or bad it is.

**
A key question I would have is:  if you find out it's bad, what are you going to do about it? Buy a new radio?  The only way to tell would be an "old time" scope on the RF output of your transmitter.
**

3- At some point, and I don't remember when, the vertical axis (element) of the XY tuning "ring" remained vertical but almost always was squiggly, not a clean oval. It then seemed I couldn't contact anyone!

**
Not sure what's going on here from your description.  You couldn't contact them because they didn't answer?  You couldn't decode their signal? 

If the former, make sure you don't have the MMTTY AFC or NET on during S&P calls.  If the latter, I don't use the XY scope.  I use the spectrum and make sure the peaks of the received signals are aligned on the mark/space markers.
***

Al
AB2ZY