Who among us has not thought of a suggestion for a new feature for RTTY by WF1B?? Don't be embarrassed, some of us even told Ray about it. WF1B has always successfully walked the line between simple yet sufficient. Jay WS7I pointed out at Dayton that Ray's major contribution was opening up RTTY contesting to operators who do not type,  bringing in many fine competitors who have raised the standards to more than just fast typing. So what happens when WF1B adds some big bells and whistles to our beloved paragon of simplicity? Let's jump to a picture of the new main page (the VOLTA contest is used):

But there is much more here than meets the eye. Lets start on the right side and examine what we see:
The callsign in the box is shown with the status of the caller and his country on all bands. Officially, this is to aid us in asking the caller to QSY to a needed frequency, a normal technique for the best contesters. Personally, it gives me an opportunity to express my grateful thanks to anyone who called me a second time in the same contest.
  This shows that AA5AU has called me twice before on 40 and 20 meters (note I am on 10 meters now) and it also shows that I need the country W on 10 meters, so he is a mult.
Just below the WORKED box, there is 00:01:56 ; this is the time elapsed since I logged the last contact; it serves to keep us on our toes; perhaps it should flash red when it reaches 10 minutes or so!
Last, but not least, the little triangles on the right will scroll the screen back and forwards; a major help if you have ever had some needed info scroll off the screen when a bunch of carriage returns came through and in the WAE QTC traffic. The price of this is obvious .. the line length has been reduced to 60 characters from 78 but should not be a problem for contesting, as long as the caller does not send you his Pactor bragtape. (Don't laugh, it happens ... at least to me ).

Next, the bottom of the screen is different .... the last several calls are below the current call instead of above, but the big difference is that you edit any call still showing directly; just type over with any corrections, much easier than the alt-E route. Once it has scrolled off the bottom, corrections must be made with the alt-E key as in the 2.5 version. WF1B has automatically guessed that AA5AU is in CQ Zone 4 and I have clicked on the "500" and it has been entered in the log. All this is pretty much as it was before, the big change being that corrections can be made right now without going to a sub-routine.

That little "Wyvern Technology" logo at the top of the screen hides a major new feature; click on it and the new "Pull-Down" menus appear.  There are several categories :

This picture shows the "System" choices that give a lot more control without exiting the program. The "Serial Ports" will be important for those really getting into it with com ports for (1) mouse, (2) radio control, (3) HF TNC, (4) DxCluster TNC, and (5) networking port. (Not to mention (6) K6STI FSK/PTT).

The "Windows" box (don't get scared, stay with me!) gives many displays of everything of possible interest about the calls worked so far .. Not really different from the old version, they are just all there without remembering all those alt-U etc commands.

There has been some nice changes in the Macro / Function Keys / Buffers or whatever you call them ...First, the editing is easier as you can jump around at will, push "end"  to go the end of a line, etc. Also, the "SHIFT" macros have been added so you do not have to exit and edit RTTY.INI anymore. These macros are my own and have to be changed to use all WF1B features like the "NOW...... " command (Hear the laughter from the big guns?)

More good news: the province hunting contests (besides the Roundup !) have been added: the Spanish, Polish, ARI, and Russian tests. This will hopefully help the entries on these contests, at least for the more casual operator. Scoring is still done the same but I cannot resist showing a Volta score for the sake of our Editor N2HOS, who loves big things. Eat your heart out, Jim!

The last major set of features is the Networking and DxCluster capabilities. I will leave them for another article other than to point out that you can now connect two or more computers together via ordinary serial ports and it will keep serial numbers straight and share log info for dupes, etc. This will be a big help to multi-multi, multi-single, and the single-multi operators. The Dx Cluster ability will show RTTY spots on the main screen and if you have rig control, clicking will QSY the radio automatically. This may well increase the popularity of RTTY spots during contests. Going to the "Packet" page will give you a window to your VHF TNC so you can connect, display spots, and enter your own spots manually. You can also elect to keep a running log of all cluster activity during the test.

   So what else? How about the option of keeping a complete log of everything that came in on your screen? Every last garbage character .. or was it garbage? Check a suspicious call sign or exchange afterward? How about QTC traffic? Just turn it on with RTTY.INI. Which brings us to the most intimidating part of Version 3 .. There are many more features that can be set and remembered by RTTY.INI (Like your favorite colors) but it is necessarily a lot longer. Ray has included a fairly complete example to start with. I expect the manual will have complete reference info ... but I have not seen it yet! If you are using 2.5 now, converting to 3.0 without the DxCluster and Networking will require essentially no setup or change on your part. I suspect more people will start to use WF1B for DX chasing and rag chewing with these new features.

     To go into networking, etc, you will probably need more com/serial ports on your computer. I currently have six comports in use on the main operating computer (DOS, of course; I like to keep things simple) and hope to write an article soon on how to do it.