[WriteLog] EA-RTTY Experiences MMTTY/2Tone

[WB2COY]

The EA-RTTY contest went well here from my modest station with wire antennas and doing S&P. Writelog with MMTTY and  2Tone worked without a hitch.

To avoid the known issue with AFC getting turned on in MMTTY with XMMT.ocx whenever the CALL field is cleared (not a good thing for S&P and FSK) I chose to run with the following setup:

Main Rttyrite Window – MMTTY using the PlugIn – Port set to my FSK COM port in Rttyrite, COM-Txd(FSK) selected in MMTTY setup.

First Clone Window – 2Tone (XMMT.ocx, of course) default settings, except when operating 40M at night, where I set it for Fluttered.

Second Clone Window – MMTTY using XMMT.ocx, profile set to AA6YQ.

I made sure that I NEVER clicked on TU type in Rttyrite in the Main window, so I didn’t have a single lockup throughout the contest.

2Tone pulled in a few callsigns and reports that I would have missed without it, although MMTTY with AA6YQ profile comes close to matching 2Tone on weak signals. This saved many repeat requests.

Generally, 2Tone served to verify that what I saw in the MMTTY windows was correct, especially for those times when I saw a serial number once in MMTTY, while 2Tone showed it twice. I usually assume that if I see the same number twice, it is a good number. I operated with my Icom 756 ProIII Twin Peak Filter OFF, and set my RTTY filter to 350Hz, as suggested by the author of 2Tone. Thjis worked well. 

My only wish was that the bands were in better shape. From here in the Northeast, I only made one contact on 10M, from South America. 20M seemed to go to sleep at times, but it did work well into the nighttime hours, which was a pleasant surprise. 40M was generally good, and 80M seemed to have limited activity, at least from my viewpoint. On 20M, I was hearing a lot of cases where multiple stations were calling CQ on the same frequency, from different continents. I think this was because the band was acting strangely and stations that would normally hear each other were not.

All in all, an enjoyable contest, and a good test of Writelog 11.10G. I am still looking forward to being able to run everything with XMMT.ocx and drop the old PlugIn.

73  Bob  WB2COY