[UK-CONTEST] Re software

[Ian White GM3SEK]

Phil Cooper wrote:
>
>I wonder if the author of the software to which you refer is a guy 
>called Chen, W7AY ??
>
>If so, then he is indeed a good contester, although less so these days. 
>He has written CocoaModem software for RTTY for the MAC, and it is well 
>used and very much liked.
>

There are big differences between contest software and general logging 
software - and then there's a third group: digital software like Digipan 
and MMTTY which have acquired some logging and message features but 
didn't start out primarily as loggers.

What contesting software needs are plugins that do the digital stuff but 
leave everything else to the main software.  For RTTY we have the MMTTY 
plugin which integrates nicely with both Writelog and N1MM... but that's 
*all* we have. The author of MMTTY has moved on to other things and the 
source code is not available, so the RTTY contesting community is very 
exposed to the MMTTY plugin becoming incompatible with contesting 
software under future releases of Windows. Or to put it more simply, if 
the MMTTY plugin stops working, we're stuffed.

By all accounts, CocoaModem is the best sound card RTTY decoder around, 
but it is intimately tied to the Mac... and it isn't contesting 
software. With all respect to the people who are starting out on Mac 
contesting software right now, they have 5-10 years development work to 
catch up on.


-- 

73 from Ian GM3SEK
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek