I am finally ready after 7 years to be an active rtty contester Stateside. I
only worked about 20 q's on 15 and 20m during the final 3rd segment under
terrible band conditions. I want to give a special thanks to Mike, K4GMH,
who found me reversed and gave me my first QSO. I did get 3 continents
with 400w and a G5RV below rooftop height. I had to dust off my old
FT1000MP, because I am still waiting for my Flex 6000 after ordering it at
Dayton last year. With excellent help from Don- AA5AU's precise set up
instructions on the web I had no trouble using 2TONE while transmitting FSK
with MMTTY in a 2 window setup on WRITELOG v11.11C.
It was very interesting to compare the two simultaneously decoding weak and
fading signals during electrical storm conditions here in Houston. The low
SNR, high QRN and fading signals usually printed much better with 2TONE, but
not always. That is very anecdotal sampling, but I think, with a poor
antenna in an
over-55 deed restricted subdivision it will be my way ahead. My other QTH is
VK4UC; a call veteran RTTY contesters will be familiar with. For 12 years I
have used K6STI's RITTY DOS decoder on a Win98 computer using WL v10.6. I
stay with it for the same reasons that I now will use 2TONE in Houston.
At VK5UC I have a capable antenna farm and I run pileups regularly. RITTY
has important algorithms that allow good decoding in those heavy QRM
conditions. 2TONE does not have that yet. One feature is dynamic
thresh-holding which I think aides in capturing the slightly stronger
signals. Another is a "flywheel" which captures a likely callsign and looks
ahead for its particular bit train to the exclusion of other signals. When
it finally confirms a good callsign it then prints it, sometimes on the next
line. They together allow me to maintain good rates when signals are strong
from EU or NA, something I couldn't do with MMTTY. It would be great if
future 2TONE development addresses something like these capabilities. Then,
finally, we all could have a state-of-art Windows-based contesting decoder.
John W5UG / VK4UC
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