pa0r

This morning I had only one email waiting on pskmail, a 7k masterpiece from the crew of PI4TUE who were preparing for the PACC contest this weekend. The server at SM0RWO was a stable S7, as always in the late morning hours (we don't get out of bed very early here). So this was to be a piece of cake again.

And indeed, the first bit came in without problems and I enjoyed watching the block size of pskmail going up to 64 characters per block. If you are used to PSK31 or RTTY, that is quite fast, and the protocol overhead is only 6% in this case. But this was sunday morning, and it could not be true. There was an RTTY contest going on HF, and all non-contesters would be on 30 meters?

You bet.... The first intermezzo was a PSK63 signal, S9+20, that came smack on frequency and started to send

"rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" on top of the server. Pskmail got a hicup, but went on as if the rx had been dead during the intervention. 60 seconds later, probably the same station (did not send a call, so must be an unlis...) came back, this time with a lot more creativity: äskdjhnjklssjhhssssrrrrrrrrrrrrsjk,,fffmmklajdshjiwioinbnamjdbnj".

Interesting. The burper was actually communicating!!!

Pskmail went on, now with a block size of 16 chars/block, which makes the text slightly worse to read for an outsider.

Again a few minutes later: '"QRZ QRZ QRZ? What means 2615?""

As the email got really stuck now, and was not ready, I could not answer this interesting question. Meanwhile the number of repeats had triggered PSKmail to reduce the block size further to 8 characters/block, but it was still pushing the text through. The jammer gave up.

5 minutes later, a PSK31 signal came on our channel, exactly zero beat with our frequency, and started calling CQ I guess,at least I cannot imagine that he was in qso, as the SM0RWO server was still pushing text with an S7 signal.

PSkmail could get 1 block through out of 8 during the times the caller was silent.He gave up after another 5 minutes.

After this we only got disturbed by the "pregnant sea cow" living 1.5 kHz higher, supposedly passing packet radio trraffic. This guy (or girl for that matter) is so overmodulated that his signal is 3 kHz wide, and knocks our PSK63 signal out when he vomits on our channel. This normally knocks out only 1  block out of a sequence of 8, but the speed is going down dramatically because of the automatic block length adjustment.

I have made some pictures during this session (yes, this was one 40-minute session!)

This was not all. During the rest of the qso (1 email !) I was jammed by 2 SSB stations (this was 30 meters!!) who started a qso right on top of us, (PSKmail worked during the listening period of the loudest station), and 4 pactor stations, who just switched their burpers on without listening. Some of them started off-frequency, but completely blanketed the signal as soon as they switched to higher bandwidth. At one time I had an SSB qso with a pactor signal on top on our channel!!

But in 40 minutes time I managed to get the email through!!!

What I have learned during this interesting qso?

• Don't think any of the digital operators will listen on frequency before transmitting.
• Don't think an SSB station will give a damn if he ruins your digital qso
• Don't think any pactor 2/3 operator has a clue what he is doing
• Don't think he cares a damn about you losing your qso, he doesn't know who you are anyway
• When you use a different mode from the other guy you are an ALIEN, which must be shown he is not welcome here.
• Don't think ham spirit still exists in the digital sub bands

And this was 30 meters.... outside the WARC bands the RTTY contest was spreading anarchy.