North American QSO Party, RTTY
Call: VE3IAY
Operator(s): VE3IAY
Station: VE3IAY
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: ON
Operating Time (hrs): 10
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160:
80: 50 25
40: 62 29
20: 70 32
15: 50 23
10: 11 9
-------------------
Total: 243 118 Total Score = 28,674
Club: Contest Club Ontario
Team:
Comments:
As in other recent RTTY contests, I operated SO1R2S - one radio (actually more
like 0.9; my TS850 is ill), two software programs. I had two computers, the
primary one running N1MM Logger 2.1.60 with MMTTY 1.64 as the RTTY engine, and a
second one using the same audio from the radio but running MixW 2.07
(receive-only).
In the ARRL and BARTG Sprint tests, the performance of the two programs was
reasonably comparable. However, in this one, for whatever reason, MixW
definitely outperformed MMTTY as a decoder. I had a significant number of QSOs
where I would have had to ask for repeats based on MMTTY alone (because I
couldn't pick out the exchange or the call sign), but where MixW decoded the
information clearly, allowing me to enter the data into N1MM by hand. This
despite the fact that I was tuning using the MMTTY tuning indicators, and left
the MixW tuning alone.
After the contest, I looked more closely at the MMTTY settings. I was using the
IIR demodulator. The shift in both computers was 182 Hz for all QSOs. I see now
that the AV. setting was 30 Hz (I don't recall ever changing this, but...),
while the setting in my stand-alone copy of MMTTY is 70 Hz. On the other hand,
at the beginning of the contest I switched among MMTTY's demodulators briefly
and didn't see a lot of difference, and the setting for one of them wouldn't
have affected the others. Was the propagation just such that the MixW algorithm
outshone MMTTY under these particular conditions? Beats me...
As for the radio, it has an ALC instability which caused my transmitted signal
strength to drop suddenly every few seconds. The problem was worst at the
beginning of the contest and had almost gone away by the end. I hope it didn't
affect my signal quality - no-one commented, but it was a contest, after all. I
also have intermittent problems with the tuning knob encoder, but fortunately
the software control of the radio's frequency is unaffected. Anyway, I guess
it's time for some surgery on the radio. I'm going to be away for BARTG, so now
is a good time to take the radio out of service for a while.
The vertical antenna worked the same as usual (equally lousy in all directions,
as they say), despite a foot of fresh snow covering the feedpoint. The radio's
autotuner had to work hard on 15m, but the other bands did not seem to be
affected.
I worked a couple of non-NA stations, including OD5/OK1MU, but unlike the others
who were clearly in the contest, he was not and didn't give me a name for the
exchange, so that particular QSO is not in my contest log.
73,
Rich
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