Gary,
I did not listen to the contest this time.
The next time you operate a contest, please send me an email ahead of time and
I will try to make time to record and analyze what could be wrong. The path
between Oregon and Alaska is usually very good. Alternately, perhaps someone
has recorded you this time, in which case I probably can use their recordings.
If other folks are copying you without any problem, your baud rate has to be
within a few percent of being correct, otherwise they will start throwing lots
of decoding errors when conditions are even a little rough (like a signal from
KL7-land :-). So baud rate is likely not to be the problem.
Changing the number of stop bits will change the WPM (without changing the baud
rate). The difference between 1 stop bit (7 bits per character) and 2 stop
bits (8 bits per character) can slow you down noticeably (almost 15%).
The other possibility is your exchange itself. If you are using a space
character in between two numbers, each one will introduce an extra FIGS
character if you have USOS turned on. This BARTG is a numbers only exchange,
so there could be many extra FIGS being thrown around. If an exchange has 25
characters, and there are just two extra FIGS in there, you slow down by 8%.
For example, if others are sending "599-0123-0123," and you send "599 0123
0123," you can be perceived to be slower.
"Someone" in the contesting community should whip up a Java tool to figure out
the number of seconds an exchange takes when you enter the actual exchange and
states such as number of stop bits and USOS condition. Perhaps such a tool
should even be embedded into RTTY contest programs. Most RTTY ops know how to
count them, but it could be an eye opener for folks who are not familiar with
stop bits and LTRS/FIGS shifts. Often, it is not a matter of choosing a
shorter exchange for the human reader, but on how you create the exchange for a
machine.
73
Chen, W7AY
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