[UK-CONTEST] Computer free data contesting

[David G3YYD]

Stewart

I did notice the CW to RTTY conversion as it did not sound like hunt and 
peck typing. G3LET was doing the same. Thank you for the RTTY QSO.

If you need help on setting up N1MM then I can help you on that one as I 
am using a K3 and N1MM. Send me an email direct and we can set up a SSB 
QSO to talk you through the N1MM configuration.

I did quite a bit of work on PSK31 in the early days with G3PLX and 
quickly discovered that is does not cope with multi path and multiple 
reflections especially with differing Doppler shifts and times of 
arrival. To this end I did RTTY first which has a much greater immunity 
to multi-path with Doppler and differential delays. My reasoning being 
that later in the contest some of the multiple reflections would go as 
the lower layers of the ionosphere "dissolved" as the MUF dropped. I did 
not run PSK until 2058 and it seemed to work well at that time. Possibly 
should have started PSK running a bit earlier to get a better RTTY/PSK 
balance.

David G3YYD

On 22/01/2010 08:28, Stewart Rolfe wrote:
> Like some others on here I struggled to set up N1MM in time for last night's data CC...all forgotten from last year! So I decided to ditch the soundcard and the macros and check out the K3's cw to data gizmo - send cw from the paddle and have it magically converted to PSK or RTTY while reading the incoming on the (just) adequate scrolling LCD display.
>
> It's really neat and I did the whole contest this way; the only automation being a CQ message in the K3's cw memory while the PC was used, but only as a dumb log keeper. You need perfect cw though so apologies for the occasional unexpected character on your screen. Will be interesting to see if anyone noticed any difference; I was sending mostly at 26wpm to try to keep the cw timing in hand and I guess this was lagging behind PC sent RTTY at 45 baud a good deal (45 Baud is about 60wpm..?)
>
> So quite an interesting evening but only 31 contacts. I did however stick to my decision to split the time 50:50 between PSK/RTTY and only squeezed 7 Qs from the PSK...!!; I felt inter UK paths from here were suffering from heavy phase distortion and copying most PSK signals was a problem.
>
> 73,
>
> Stewart, GW0ETF
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