RITTY PSK31
At the club meeting the speaker for the evening was Robert Chudek. He was very informative and inspiring for me. It also brought back memories of my younger brother N0BQV. He also had a huge old clunker of a green machine that to me then was nothing less then magic. He called it the tank, and it really was a tank it would take both of us to move it to another location in the small shack he had in the basement. When little bro put the power to it, it would come to life not unlike the old equipment you see in an old Frankenstein movie. Anyway Bob’s demonstration and hi love of this communication mode had me downloading a few programs that night when I returned home from the meeting. MMTTY & DgiPan 2.
MMTTY was up and running the following day with just an audio jumper connected to the sound card line in but it had a bad 60hz hum to put up with. But I was reading RITTY on the monitor COOL! That very same day the UPS Brown guy dropped of a Rigblaster Pro, more cool, and no more hum. After a few days of looking at RITTY with some very good copy I figured the operators were speaking a language that I didn’t know. I can see it will take me awhile to pick up on the RITTY speak but I will continue to educate myself with the mode as time pass’s.
I then installed DigiPan 2 for PSK31 this was altogether a horse of a different color. I really liked this sweet little program. With in an hour I had QSL’s on the way and a few of these were DX. One contact UR7FM sent me his grid position and that put him in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Clickity clickity click (UR7FM please resend grid) Sure enough he is a Communications. Officer onboard a container ship. OK I’m impressed since I was only running 20watts of power but over the last few days I have been seeing some very good copy of QRP stations running only 3 watts from the west coast. Another thing I like about PSK31 is its somewhat informal approach to communications in that digital mode. It is not very unlike IRC over the internet. With the new interface up and running I was able to get right in on the action. Even with the poor band conditions I was logging respectable DX when you just couldn’t do it with phone with out running a KW or TWO. So OK I’m sold, look for me on your waterfall I’m the guy that types 10 words per minute with errors…………KC0ZQB (Mike)