hi Dennis - welcome to RTTY contesting! I went through the same thing when I
started, and understanding what is happening here will help you reduce your
number of fill requests by a whole bunch.
Take a look at your QWERTY keyboard and look the correspondence of numbers
to the letters immediately below and to the right:
1 corresponds to Q
2 corresponds to W
and so forth. All numbers in RTTY (and a few others characters) are
preceeded by a SHIFT character, which causes a Q bit pattern to be
interpreted as a '1' instead. This was done to fit letters, numbers, and
punctuation into a 5-bit code (only 32 combinations). This is also why you
saw letters instead of numbers: if the SHIFT gets obliterated, that's what
you see. You'll also see the letter 'A' instead of a space for the same reason.
Find a table of Baudot characters and study the bit patterns - I usre hope
there is still one in the back of the ARRL Handbook!
Once you master this, you will ask for fewer fills because you will see the
letters and know what they mean. For example, you know that:
NB1B TU TOOAPQWAPQWAPQW
is a report of 599 012 012 012
And now you should know which letter corresponds to '3' ;-)
hope this helps! - jeff wk6i
At 02:01 PM 2/14/2005, NB1B wrote:
>What mechanism makes some programs send the letters instead of the numbers?
>I don't think the problem was on my rx end when someone would send me "TOO
>PPQ PPQ", I'd ask for the number, and he would repeat the same string of
>letters a second time. What actually clued me in to this was a station
>would send "599 PQP 010", so I'd ask for the number, and he'd send "599 010
>PQP" back.
--
Jeff Stai jds@twistedoak.com
Twisted Oak Winery http://www.twistedoak.com/
Rocketry Org. of CA http://www.rocstock.org/
Amateur Radio WK6I
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