ROS Mode

Having had very good, if rather slow-paced success with the JT65 digimode, I somehow found myself playing with ROS mode the other day.

I think it was because someone had spotted a ROSer on the 20m cluster, so I downloaded the free software, see what mess I could get myself into.

My kids love the look of ROS, with its many little clocks and musical notes!

As usual, it takes a little while to learn your way around the macros and the commands peculiar to the software.

In fact, once settled-in, I found the ROS software to be one of the most carefully thought-out pieces of code going.  It lets you resize the window within the software, so you can see everything that's going on.  It connects to the rig seamlessly and with few mouse clicks.  It brings up a link to the QRZ.com page of each callsign, and even a link to short and long path circuit reliability for the band in use.

ROS is not as immediate as PSK, for example.  But you can have a fairly rapid  real-time typed QSO at selectable speeds, and it's much more powerful in covering global distances with few or no decoding errors at QRP and slightly above QRP powers. Each halving of character sending speed effectively doubles your power, so tortoise and hare can apply if conditions aren't so hot.

After just two days of ROS working, I've added two new DX entitites to the log.  I also rather like ROS for the fact that it's so well thought-out, and has relatively few users on 20m, increasing the chances greatly of grabbing those rare DX calls.  ZL2AUB, who features in the above screengrab, has become a daily check-in, which is also very nice!