rjr@mgweed.UUCP (Bob Roehrig) (10/16/84)
Sorry for the late posting of the last shuttle dope. I usually get the bulletins twice a week off the air, Monday and Friday nights (local time). I prefer those nights because the propagation forecast is there on Mon., and the DX bulletin is only on on Fri. Because of lousy propagation, at times, and QRM, I have to do quite a bit of editing to get "clean" copy. At times I copy all three modes (Baudot, ASCII, and AMTOR) and still miss some major words or info in a bulletin. Then I have to wait to get the stuff from another source. Quite often, the DX bulletin has stuff that is obsolete by the time I get it on the net. THis is especially true if you can't access the system from home and have to wait til the following Monday. The same is true on some other bulletins, like the NASA one. It could also be that that may have been the only new bulletin to appear that time and I didn't feel like logging on just to work on that one. (I get lazy at times). It does take some effort to get this stuff out, since I have to convert from either AMTOR or Baudot to ASCII. (Sure, our computer can do that, but I would still have to convert the baud rate). I do try and get the "important" stuff out as fast as I can. A recent article in RTTY JOURNAL confirmed what a lot of us knew all the time: Slower baud rates get thru better !!!!!!!!!!! Copy is ALWAYS better at 60wpm Baudot than the 110 baud ASCII or AMTOR!!!!! I never know from one day to the next which band is gonna be better to copy W1AW on, 20 or 40 meters. Fortunately with the memories in the 930, I can check all their freqs in a few seconds. But usually 40 meters is clobbered by foreign SSB, and 20 may be too weak. I think we should start a letter campaign to the station manager of W1AW to: 1) Move the W1AW rtty bulletin frequencies to the extreme bottom of the bands to minimize qrm. 2) Start transmitting on 30 meters too! This may fill in the gap when propagation is bad on other bands. I am going to try diversity one of these days. Frequency diversity is the best but it takes at least 2 copyable freqs to do it and often there are not 2. Bob K9EUI