[GreenKeys] re: WRU & Selcal Comments

[JerryL]

These very same concerns were taken up many years ago on most of the
original RTTY autostart frequencies.

The WRU ideas are excellent as they allow someone clear across the
country to check the propagation paths to specific parts of the country
before sending a message aimed at someone in that part of the country.
You have to be careful and make sure you incorporate the persons call
sign in the wru request, as a plain old 'WRU' only, will bring up
everyone in the country that hears it.  That happened a few times in the
olden days before we quickly fixed it, and it was shear bedlam.
Interesting to listen to though!  But something like XXXWRU where XXX
represents the last part of your call works pretty well.  Then your
response should include turning on your transmitter and sending
somewhere around 30-40 ltrs characters, before you send your little
answer-back text.   If you don't include a string of ltrs characters,
then most of the TU's and TTY's won't have time to come up to speed to
copy the WRU.

Digital autostart, while it works, I have found to leave something to be
desired.  I have it on my Dovetrons here and almost never use it.  A
plain old mark carrier seems to work well for everyday use.  And yes,
one gets false starts and such, but you get used to it.  I notice none
of my ST-8000's have digital autostart and instead rely totally on
detecting a carrier to print.  They have other digital features, but Hal
Devices decided long ago that it wasn't worth the effort so never
included it in the early models of the 8000's.  I havn't checked lately
so perhaps something new has come along.

The deal on Selcal while useful and interesting, ended up sorta falling
by the wayside.  About the only time I activated it was if someone kept
trying to send a picture on the net frequency and wasting a lot of my
paper.  Otherwise I normally kept it off, as I liked to monitor
everything that was going on the net frequency, even if I didn't take
part in the current topic of discussion.

The store/repeat idea was interesting and it did work, but it finally
more or less died.  Most of us in real life, just waited until we could
hear a WRU in the part of the country we were interested in transmitting
to and then went ahead and sent our traffic.

If this takes off, some good times ahead for all of us!

Jerry
n6jp@arrl.net