[RTTY] RBN access; RTTY Spots

[Tim Shoppa]

> If I call CQ, I hope to see my own callsign listed, and then be able to
> judge where the best propagation is, and thus point my beam to that area.
> What I have seen though is loads of calls being spotted that are calling
ME.
> This is also readily apparent when some juicy DX is on the band, as there
> are spots for that call, but also spots for each and every caller to the
DX
> station.

I thought that the RTTY skimmers in Makrothen 2014 were one step better,
most notably in not showing the S&P calls, than in CQ WW 2014 just a few
weeks before, and the skimmer performance in CQ WW 2014 was phenomenally
good compared to the 2013 RTTY contests. I did both running and S&P in
Makrothen, I had the spots on, and I did not see the "pile-on of S&P calls"
that I had observed in previous contests I had entered with skimming
assistance.

That said, the skimmers (just like humans) can be tripped up by poor CQ'ing
and S&P macro forms.

I first ran across some of these exceedingly poor S&P forms in field day
where they were on the digital modes (both PSK and RTTY) in spades. A human
would've (and all too often did!) think that the S&P station owned the run
frequency due to the obtuse and out of order exchanges. There were a couple
exchanges I got in Makrothen that followed this poor form.

Similarly there are some very poor RTTY CQ forms where it is not at all
obvious to an experienced human contester, what callsign the TU applies to
and what callsign the CQ'ing station actually has.

> I also have doubts about using an RBN cluster in a contest, simply because
> it populates the bandmap with loads of spurious calls.

Spots (human or skimmer generated, CW or RTTY or SSB) always have to be
validated on-the-air before believing them. Certainly when using any spots,
a level of operator discipline is needed to prevent needless spot-chasing
from actually lowering your score

Tim N3QE