Anyone seriously operating this weekends contest and using FT8 probably
had
this happen.
You're cruising .313 looking for those new mults or whatever, you see
someone CQing WITHOUT the word TEST in the CQ message and you
instinctively
know they're not in contest mode. No worries, you think. The WSJTX
boffins have tuned the program to compensate for the difference in
exchange
and you know autosequence will seamlessly pull you through. You call and,
sure enough, back comes the 'funny little number' exchange. You reply
with
a NA contest mode exchange (because you're contesting, right ?) and....
back comes a repeat - no autosequence. What ?? OK, maybe I got QRMed.
Try again, and same thing. You can't progress to the finish.
What you do now is left to the individual. What I did was terminate the Q
and moved on. You might have fiddled with the setup to switch out of
contest mode. Whatever... the Q was either made or not.
What this did, other then temporarily piss me off and cause name calling
that nobody heard but me and the shack spiders, was confused me. HOW
could
this happen....the boffins....they fixed this. Was the other guy manually
interfering with autosequence ? Was the other guy that insistent on his
funny number ? I started ignoring those obviously not in contest mode.
This morning, after reading a soapbox comment on 3830, it finally hit
me.... (I'm pretty focused on operating during the 'test). It's.....The
Clones !! Those knock-offs of WSJT - JTDX, MHSV ! THEY don't have
contest
mode ! They can't autosequence past TX2. So, what to do about this
incompatibly ? It's pretty obvious the clones aren't going to add CM if
they haven't already and there are those contest haters that wouldn't use
it anyway, but still insist on trying to WORK contesters.
I'm thinking maybe the solution is to add some kind of 'quick button'
behavior to WSJTX that drops the program out of contest mode for just one
Q
and resets back into CM after the 73 (or something). Does anyone have
another idea ? If a number of high level contesters presented such a
request maybe the WSJT powers would respond. Or, maybe you think it's a
non-issue....or maybe a quick work around all ready exists that doesn't
require a guy to drop in and change his setup and I'm just clueless ?
-W9RM
Keith Morehouse
via MotoG
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