Sunday, February 11, 2018

Video: RTTY with the KX2

This year marks my 40th year in the hobby and, until this morning, I'd never made a single contact on RTTY. With the CQ-WPX (RTTY) Contest in full swing - and the KX2 eyeing me from the bench - I decided it was time to put an end to the dry spell.

A quick read of page 27 in the KX2 manual told me almost all I needed to know. Lacking mention is the reason for the 4-second idling time after each transmission. The manual explains how to defeat it (by sending IM with no spaces) but why is it implemented in the first place?

Tuning RTTY signals so that they decode properly takes a bit of finesse and I confess that, after an hour of tuning various stations, I still don't know how to do it quickly although it does seem to work best when the filter is set to minimum bandwidth (150 Hz).

I ended up working several stations in the contest and recorded the 2nd of them (below).
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Posted by John AE5X at

2 comments:

  1. F1JKJFebruary 11, 2018 at 4:10 PM

    Hi

    Congratulations on your RTTY QSOs !

    By the way, please note that CW « cut numbers » are of no use in RTTY. In fact in RTTY you need to send a special code to switch from letters fo figures and figures to letters. So 5NN and TT2 take longer to send than 599 and 002.

    73 de F1JKJ

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. John AE5XFebruary 11, 2018 at 5:01 PM

      Thanks for the info - I should have known not to do that. It explains some of the responses I got!

      Delete

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