[WT-support] CQ WPX RTTY Contest

[Bernhard Buettner DL6RAI]

Hello Win-Test Team:

A few observations from CQ WPX RTTY last weekend, where we did a 48
hour M-2 and logged 2,444 QSOs. We did not actually read the rules of
the contest before and struggled for 5 million points until the last
minute only to find out this afternoon that we actually must have
scored around 7 million with the correct rules applied.

In all, we were pleased with the combination of WT and MMTTY and the
program worked stable and reliably over the whole weekend. Occasionally
we managed to crash the program (see 2) but due to nice the log sync
feature nothing was lost. The lost focus problem has pretty much gone
away now. I think the numbering per band should not pose a problem
to the contest committee.

Of course, we made some surprising real-life observations and report
them here to make WT even better next time. So, here we go:

1) When your QSO partner sends his serial number without a space
between RST and number like "599074" and you click it in the RTTY
receive window this will fill up the received number field and you
cannot edit it. The only thing you can do is to pres ctrl-W and
re-type the number.

2) I can crash the Win-Test program from the RTTY (radio1) window as
follows:

a) press and hold the left mouse button on a space, * or - character and
   drag over it to mark this character
b) release the mouse button now
c) WT is frozen

You can even do this with the RTTY startup message where WT says it
has started MMTTY.exe sucessfully. Just select one of the * characters
and bingo!

This happened to me about 5-6 times during the contest while trying
to to catch a callsign with the mouse.

3) When the QSO entry line is empty and you press F2, the report
sent will not contain the serial number although the corrct text is
programmed ($RST $SERIAL). I'd expect it to send the serial number
of the previous QSO [on this band]. This works as expected on CW
but not on RTTY. This problem was also reported by Göran, SM4JHF,
earlier today.

4) Win-Test saves window status to WT.INI only when you exit the
program in a normal way like saying QUIT on the command line or going
to the menu "File | Exit". However, when the program crashes due to
a problem - and you never had left the program in a normal way before,
all the windows are gone and you may actually find yourself very
lonely in the main window only showing the last 10 QSOs. This is worst
when the program ran for 24 hours or more because at that time in the
contest you have really optimized window sizes and positions for this
very contest.

Feature request: Save window status more often, maybe once every hour
or after every change to the layout.

Thanks for your work on RTTY! 

73 Ben, DL6RAI