[RufzXP] RufzXp tips?

[Fabian Kurz]

Hi Peter,

> can tell me how I can best to begin.  I am training only in the
> Toplist mode. What speed can I best to start. My top speed is now
> 41wpm.  But that is only a few times and then the speed is go down
> again to around the 37wpm.  Can I begin better with the speed on
> 40wpm or pherhaps on 30wpm?

I always start as _high_ as possible, faster than the speed I can
reliably copy. I found that my scores are usually a lot better this
way, than if I started low and had to climb my way up to the top
speed. In my case, my start speed is 702 CpM at the moment, during 
most attempts I am somewhere around 624 CpM in average, and the lowest
speed is usually not below 600. If I ever fall way below 600, it's
very difficult to get up again.
I often tried to start at a slower speed, but it's much more difficult
to climb up to your maximum speed than to climb down...

> Sometimes it is getting very good and then another time it is going
> bad sometimes for days.  I practise every day here, but see not much
> progress yet.

There is a strong daily variation in my scores, and I think it's
completely normal. On bad days, I can hardly reach 120k, on good days I
do one 140k score after another. It depends very much on my mood, how
tired I am, etc.

Something which will improve your score a lot is - obviously - if you
know a lot of callsigns from your head. The callsigns in the
RufzXP-Database are all from real contest logs, so an active contester
knows a good percentage of them. I'd guess in an average attempt I
know more than a third of the callsigns already, and in a few cases
each time, I only can type in the right call because I know it. This is
especially true for the very long calls. 

But not only knowing callsigns itself helps, but also knowing the
patterns how callsigns are issued helps a lot (for example, if you
copy a JA-call with just one letter suffix, you know there is
something wrong, since these calls don't exist, etc.). It sounds not
too important, but I guess at least once or twice in an attempt I get
a call only right, because of two possible letters I might have heard,
only one matches a normal callsign pattern.

One more hint which will magically increase your scores: Avoid using
F6 whenever you can. If you don't get the callsign on the first try,
you'll most likely not get it on the second, and if you do the next
call will be too fast anyway, and you'll lose even more points. I only
use F6 occasionally for some very long callsigns (like KH0/JA5EWH
etc), and even there it's usually not too helpful.

73,
-- 
Fabian Kurz, DJ1YFK * Dresden, Germany * http://fkurz.net/
Online Log: http://dl0tud.tu-dresden.de/~dj1yfk/log.html