[RTTY] Contacts vs Power and Skill in RTTY contests

[Tim Shoppa]

Just choosing my past 7 years in RTTY WPX, the power I ran, the number of
contacts, and the score:

2012 - 100W - 334 Q's - 188K points
2013 - 400W - 689 Q's - 900K points
2014 - 400W - 973 Q's - 1300K points
2015 - 1500W - 1322 Q's - 2465K points
2016 - 1500W - 1508 Q's - 3003K points
2017 - 1500W - 1653 Q's - 3518K points

My extrapolation is that a 4x increase in power results in about twice as
many Q's. So a 15x increase in power (100W to 1500W) results in about 4
times as many Q's.

My antenna setup is nearly unchanged in the past decade so I can factor
that out.

Of course, my skills and enthusiasm and operating hours for RTTY contesting
also grew over the past 6 years too. RTTY decoder technology has also grown
too. So while the improvement hasn't been entirely due to power, I think my
enthusiasm and enjoyment and on-time increased as I increased power in a
very strong relation too.

The concept that several have expressed here and elsewhere, that there is
no skill in RTTY contesting, is very wrong. Maybe it might be skill-free if
you only work the strongest stations that have perfect print.

I work all kinds of weak stations that call me, requiring running multiple
decoders in parallel and using my judgement and experience to piece
together their callsigns and exchanges. While also using my ears to judge
which print was more likely to be correct than the others in the face of
QRM and QRN.  It's a much more visual experience than CW or SSB contesting
and incorporating an additional sense to the activity is actually very
satisfying and engaging.

Tim N3QE