I tried to work a few contacts in the NA RTTY contest on Saturday. This
contest limits everyone to 100 watts, so no big guns around.
20 meters was full of signals and they generally decoded well. I could hear
stations running other stations, and see both signals.
But when I tried to reply at 50 watts, I didn't make a signal contact. If I
did search& pounce, I would either be ignored in favor of someone else, or get
AGN? AGN? and they'd still fail to copy when I repeated. If I called CQ,
pretty soon another station would move in on top of me, not perfectly aligned,
thinking the band was clear. MMTTY is clearly working properly since
everything decodes, and the transmit peaks are where they should be.
How are so many ops doing so well at 100 watts or less when I can't seem to
make a single contact at 50? I don't want to destroy my finals by running at a
full 100 watts on a 100% duty cycle mode. My antennas are pretty good,
considering they are not beams. I tried two different antennas, and neither
the high nor the low dipole worked.
What tricks have others found to making RTTY contacts? I've done a lot of
PSK31, JT65, even FeldHell, but have never really dabbled in RTTY until now.
73,
Cathy
N5WVR
