[Alexandria Radio Club Reflector] I've been a naughty boy

[Ian]

I’ve been a naughty boy.  I have not participated in a major contest since
the IARU HF Championship in July 2019.  As a consequence, my call dropped
off the Super Check Partial database, http://www.supercheckpartial.com/.
This database of “known contesters” is incorporated into a lot of software
logging programs and allows the operator to improve his or her guess when a
partial call is copied.  This is especially useful for RTTY where there is
no forward error correction (FEC) and your call can get trashed for any
number of reasons like QSB, QRN, and QRM.  QRN can “create” random
characters in a RTTY decode window so you’ll see a lot of operators
repeating calls a couple of times in the exchange.  I only worked 84
stations in this past weekend’s CQ WW RTTY contest but I could have worked
more if I wasn’t repeating my call a lot.  Other ops were appending a
letter to "N8IK" not realizing it is a 1x2 call.  I have no doubt that SCP
would have reduced that.  Still a fun contest and, as usual, 40m was great
on Saturday and Sunday evening.

73, Ian N8IK