RTTY: Last Fall I began regularly checking in to the RTTY traffic net on 80M. 80 was often in rough shape propagation-wise and much QRN. They did run the net poorly (long seemingly endless net call-ups) but most of all it was hampered by so many repeats just for the check-ins. It was frustrating to spend 5 minutes trying to pin-down the call of a checkin and attempt to determine if they had traffic, this due to garbled characters from the rough conditions. It was especially frustrating because if they had used MFSK16 or Olivia the same conditions would have produced better copy and a shorter net!
I'll say again, a digital traffic net will rarely produce any traffic. There might be a few hams that send traffic to each other just to make the dubious purpose seem more legitimate, but that's about it. One alternative idea might be to focus the net on TRAINING in message handling. I belong to a net does just that...via CW. Students check in and they are moved to another frequency and are sent practice messages. A digital variation on this might simply that the net control sends a message to all check-ins. A regional RACES net (SSB) that I am familiar with makes a habit of sending practice messages that mimics emergency traffic messages known to cause problems under real emergencies. As an example, sending messages with medical terminology. chemical names, mixed number/letter groups (as in medical triage tags), etc, etc.
Much of the NTS sytem these days is flooded with spam, guys generating unwanted messages just to keep the NTS system alive . So a digital net is likely to die if its sole purpose is to pass traffic.
There are a lot of paper chasing hams. These blokes just love chasing QSL cards, counties, DXCC enitites, 10-10 numbers, FIST number, SKCC numbers, and the like. It might be a weird suggestion but maybe your net would also come up with some paper chasing incentive? I have an idea or two, I will give them some more thought though.
Andy K3UK
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