[GreenKeys] re: WRU & Selcal Comments

[Bob Camp]

Hi,

Back in the "good old days" setting up a digital auto start was a bit 
complex. It also added quite a bit to the cost of the TU. These days 
you can do a much better job with a $2 PIC chip than you ever could do 
back in the old days. Recognizing a twenty character string and 
checking every bit for distortion is easy to do today and was well 
beyond what anybody ever did back then.

The point is to be sure that the digital stuff is done in a way that it 
does not add to much overhead to the process *and* it stays 
interoperable with a purely mechanical system. If we are careful about 
how we set it up this should be something we can do.

	Take Care!

		Bob Camp
		KB8TQ


On Apr 28, 2004, at 10:07 PM, JerryL wrote:

> 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
>
>
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