[GreenKeys] ARRL RTTY contest

[Kevin H. Phillips]

I am also a "young" ham (licensed in 2004) and even "younger" when it 
comes to Teletype/teleprinter equipment and working RTTY but I have 
worked several contests the past few years so I will pass along a few of 
my observations and opinions.  At least now I can say I am *not* the 
youngest in a particular group I belong to (52 here)!  I feel positively 
wizened!

I think the idea of a roundtable or similar activity for "heavy metal" 
on one of the WARC bands would be a fine one in general.   I have a 
number of different machines but many are still in need of cleaning and 
re-lubing to work their best.  I am at least old enough to have learned 
my "keyboarding" on a black crinkle-finish Underwood typewriter but I am 
not as adept on a Teletype keyboard yet.  Most of the keyboards on my 
machines tend to be a little sluggish for on-air work.  [As an aside, 
have you ever heard Mark Twain's response to the question of why 
steamboats/ships were always referred to by feminine pronouns?  As I 
recall, he gave three reasons:  1)  No two of them act exactly alike;  
2) It takes a good man to handle them;  3)  Every now and then, they all 
need a good coat of paint to look their best.  Perhaps the same might be 
said for Teletypes except the last one would be "a good dose of oil and 
grease".]

The first contest I attempted was the Volta contest in 2008 or 2009.  I 
used a recently acquired Model 15 with a Dovetron TU and my Yaesu 
FT-1000D tranceiver.  I keyed the tranceiver with a footswitch, typed on 
the keyboard, then released the footswitch.  I made 50 contacts doing 
that.  My antenna was a 260ft dipole at about 20ft  fed with 
ladderline.  Antenna issues aside (i.e., people had trouble hearing me) 
I would/could have made many more contacts except for the fact that most 
people working the contests either don't know anything about CR/LF or 
don't know where the settings are in their computer software, or just 
don't care.  I kept having to turn off the radio to stop the keying of 
the loop so I could get the M15 carriage returned and moved up a line.  
It would be an exercise in enormous frustration and anger for most of 
the hams on this group to attempt to work a contest, in my humble 
opinion.   Someone mentioned the forum at Dayton.  You could also 
subscribe to the RTTY reflector if you want another dose of computer 
speak.  Mind you (and me), there are a lot of knowledgeable, extremely 
intelligent, people there and I have learned a lot but it is *all* about 
contesting, how many milliseconds go into an exchange and what's the 
best way to keep an exchange to the bare minimum of characters, and how 
quickly you can move on to the next conquest, er, I mean, contact.

Since working that first contest I have, I must confess, gone on to 
using "glass" TTY . . . but just barely.  My current setup is a HAL 
DS-3100ASR, an ST-8000 (or 6000) TU and my FT-1000D.  I no longer have 
to worry about the printer getting stuck at the end of the line and 
pounding a hole in the paper.  But, I am still manually typing in each 
and every character.  I don't use any macros (that is heresy to the 
contesting crowd).  It is "easy" in that I don't have to shift from LTRS 
to FIGS and back.   I do *not* use (yet) a laptop with MMTTY or other 
software and I log my contacts manually (hopelessly backward to the real 
contesting crowd).   My personal best with my current setup is 175 
contacts. That's light years away from most of the serious contesters 
but I am proud of it and have had fun doing it.   I haven't worked the 
contests much in at least a year because I started having so much 
trouble with RF feedback into my shack that 20m became essentially 
useless and there were problems with other bands as well.  I won't 
likely get it done in time for Field Day this year but I will soon have 
a tower up with a Mosley TA-33 on top (the antenna was a bonus when I 
acquired my first Teletype machine and has not been in the air itself in 
around 45 years).   I hope someday to build my own "hollow state" TU and 
have all sorts of tubes and parts but little time or space to work on 
one.  In any event, I would welcome an opportunity to try some on-air 
time with my real machines.  I hope you old farts don't give up on 
getting on the air yet because several of us newbies still would like to 
copy you and learn from you.

73
Kevin Phillips
W5TTY