[RTTY] Gritty vs. 2Tone with N1MM+

[Adrian Engele]

Hi Don,
I operated the DZ-DL RTTY contest from Cayman as ZF2AE. I ran MMTTY as my main decoder, 2Tone as the second decoder and Gritty as my third decoder. The bands were in horrible shape from ZF. Only managed one contact on 15M and the rest on 20M. I was using an IC-7000 with a Microham USB III in FSK mode logging with N1MM+. Band conditions had deep fades and at times 20m was completely dead; except for about 5 contacts I was able to work almost everything I heard. I was running 85W in LP mode.

MMTTY was great most of the time in FIR Profile but not perfect. 2Tone I left in Flutter mode; it was very good and better than MMTTY most of the times; but at times I had bad decode and the other two decoders did better. I was using mostly 800 Hz DSP Filter and when stations started to crowd me, I knocked it down to 500 or 450Hz. I also used 1200 Hz filter when the bands went completely silent just to make sure I was not missing something. I would say based on my band conditions roughly 60% of the time all three decoders were spot on. In the other 40% of the times, reception would vary and typically 2 out of the 3 decoders would decode the correct call.  I don't remember seeing a reduction in decoding from Gritty at narrow bandwidths, too busy handling the pileups.  The only time I had difficulty was when the simplex pileup got a little aggressive and I reverted to calling CQ when none of the decoders could pull out a call. This happened only a few times surprisingly mostly with JA stations. I suspect ZF is rare for them.  Looking at the DXCluster spots post contest, the pileups matched the cluster spot times.
Overall I was very happy operating with all three decoders. I highly recommend all RTTY operators that can use multiple decoders to do so. It will definitely increase your contesting enjoyment and increase your accuracy rate and contest pace. For future DX RTTY contests or micro DXpeditions,  I would use the same setup as I felt from the DX side I had good decoding overall during poor band conditions and I had a nice pace with few repeats going during most of the contest. 

73, Adrian AA5UK-ZF2AE


      From: Don Hill AA5AU <aa5au at bellsouth.net>
 To: 'RTTY Reflector' <rtty at contesting.com> 
 Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2016 3:34 PM
 Subject: [RTTY] Gritty vs. 2Tone with N1MM+
   
I'm curious to know which of you out there running N1MM+ use Gritty?. If so,
if you were running MMTTY in the main DI, and could only run one other
decoder in a 2nd DI, would it be Gritty or 2Tone?

I know running 2Tone is seamless with N1MM+. What about Gritty? I was under
the impression that Gritty worked best with high bandwidth (3 kHz), thus
making it unattractive for FSK users who use narrow filtering. Is this
correct?

Thanks,
Don AA5AU

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