01/09/2006 | CU2JT Being a newcomer (less than 6 months) to the RTTY mode, I find it very exciting to participate in the RTTY contests. I used to hate those RTTY signals when I was trying to work some QSO Party CW contest up on around 7040 KHz and there were RTTY all over the place.

Have to learn how to handle a RTTY pile-up. All signals mixed together and the outcome is a compsed call sign belonging to no one. Also, the lack of discipline among certain Europeans made me sound like a hacker when I had to ask for re-sends and lots of QRZ. Sorry for that.

The Azores is a great place for working the Americas region but this particular QTH is rotten when it comes to East Africa and Asia. We have
a 2000 ft mountain in that direction and the Atlantic to the west. But the time difference (2 hrs) between us and the Central Europe keeps the bands open a little longer.

I had to run my logger/RTTY generator in debug mode when I discovered that it had skipped some sequence numbers. On the Monday after the contest I found the bug and it won't happen again.

We managed to work 468 QSO, mainly on 40, 20 and 15m No signals were heard on 10 and my 40m vertical (33ft tall) underperforms on 80m although I can get the SWR down to 1:1 (Thanks, MFJ!)

Will be back in the DX contest with a burner and hope that the ham tourists stay home. Always nice to be a new multiplier - it sure helps...

Gary - CU2JT (ex SM5BGK and SM7BGK)

http://hem.passagen.se/garwik -- CU2JT