First personal call issued on me was YU3UMC. Working on 2 M CW / AM I noticed very soon that my location is bad for VHF DX-ing. On the other hand, living in the village in the Ljubljana suburb, I got the chance to put up some long-wire antennas. After constructing and building several transmitters, finally one with Geloso VFO put me QRV on 80 -10 M CW. Receiver was an solid-state HF Semcoset RX. Soon, after one year or so I got enough QSL cards for CW DXCC. They all came over bureau. Then I replaced home-made rig with a Heatkit HW-101, and activated call on SSB. In the middle of the '70 I changed the callsign to YU3IF. ARRL 5BDXCC No. 864 has been achieved on May 8, 1980. At that time chasing for 5BWAZ was very popular among DX-ers. I got contacts and QSL cards from 199 zones ( except Z2 on 80 M) before 1988. Finally in 1994 I contacted Louis VE2BQB and got card in return very soon. But during the mid-time I lost interest for this trophy and so far I haven't ask for it ( yet ).

In 1991 Slovenia decided to depart from Yugoslavia. After becoming an UN member, we got the S5 prefix. I used S58MC call at first, and in 1998 replaced it with S58T. At the same time I discovered RTTY over soundcards. RITTY by K6STI looks for me the best. I got the software on Sept 23 1998 and race started again!

After September 1998 RTTY really grabbed me. CW paddle, my old companion, has been removed from the desk, along with the microphone. I put them back only to work "new one" or ocasional 40 m CW LP QSOs. As explained in my terrain analyzer results I noticed very soon that my somehow inferior location hasn't such a great influence on RTTY signals and that I can be finally equal to other contesters.

At that time FSK was popular for chatting and approximately one year later PSK31 started to replace it. Now most of the daily traffic is on PSK31. But for contests and DX-peditions RTTY is still unbeatable.
Favourite source for my RTTY and other digital comunications' knowledge were N1RCT pages ( Dick thanks!). They were very educating, with links to everything regarding RTTY. I still remember his 10 reasons why RTTY? I citate N1RCT reason No. 9:

RTTY people are nice... They like new stations and help out with any problems. Lids are rare, jamming is rare, there is a plenty of band space for all. RTTY is traditionally known as the "Gentelmens ( and ladies ) mode" and nastiness is extremely rare.

I personally got the same impressions in all RTTY contests. Well, I advise you to rethink about your CW / SSB contest experiences, especially if you are not surrounded with hill-top or seaside bigtowers and amplifiers, and choose RTTY!

At the time when Dick in June 2000 discontinued his RTTY / PSK pages, it seemed like interest for this mode rapidly dropped. But soon after that Makoto Mori JE3HHT came out, just at the right time, with his brilliant MMTTY free Windows software, and FSK activity strongly jumped up.

I think that Mr.Mori and all who helped him on MMTTY project, somehow saved RTTY!

When I realised that on this mode there is really no need for contest equipped hill-top location to be competitive, I got enough stimulation to participate in a lot of contests. Here are some results: