Field Amtor-Pactor for the KAM

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The "Ohmygawd he wants to do AMTOR" Guide (for KAM's): And in the second edition "NOT PACTOR!!!!! Who does he think I am???????"

Remember to check all your call settings on the KAM, and make sure the time is set right (DA YYMMDDHHMMSS)

First - AMTOR

Presuming you have your HF rig properly connected to the KAM, and your computer hooked up and talking to the KAM,

1. Make sure your AMTOR Selcall is set properly in the KAM. It has to be 4 characters (no numbers) and is usually the first letter of your call followed by the last three letters of your call (eg. N6ESV's selcall would be NESV). The calling station HAS to know the receiving stations selcall to hook up. The KAM command to view or change your selcall from the cmd: prompt is MYSEL .

2. All AMTOR on HF is (should be) Lower Side Band.

3. To connect to a station calling your selcall, enter AMTOR on the KAM cmd: prompt, and tune his signal till the two green lights on the left of the KAM led display light up. Your transmitter will begin keying. You will be the receiving station until one of you initiates a switch (see 5 below).

4. To call another station, enter AMTOR followed by their selcall at the KAM cmd: prompt and wait for a connect. When they tune your signal in (the two green lights will go on), you will be the sending station.

5. In AMTOR, one station is transmitting and the other is receiving. In the beginning the station that started the connect by sending AMTOR is the information sending station. The flow can be reversed either by the sending station entering +? or by the receiving station entering Control-C followed by T.

6. Other useful commands:

While in AMTOR mode:

Control-C followed by R - shift to receive mode.
Control-C followed by T - shift to transmit mode.
Control-C followed by X - exit AMTOR to cmd: mode.

At the cmd: prompt:

LAMTOR puts you in the AMTOR listen mode

Lotsaluck!!!!!

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If you mastered AMTOR, Pactor will be really horrible. In AMTOR there is an equal length burst (chirp) from both the sending and receiving stations. In Pactor, someone brilliant decided that you could send a lot more information before getting an error-detect reply, so the burst (chirp) from the sending station is longer than the burst (chirp) from the receiving station. That's how you tell a Pactor signal from an Amtor signal.

In addition, there was a problem with Amtor using the limited RTTY character set (there is no % sign for example, and all is in caps) so Pactor implements the whole ASCII character set normally on microcomputers. There are also a number of speedy enhancements, like compression and automatic speed detection, but since those happen automatically, don't worry about it.

Pactor uses the same basic KAM type settings as Amtor, but of course they all have different names. The ones you need to know, and relate to the Amtor methods you already learned (?) are:

MYPTCALL is your Pactor call sign. Unlike Amtor where it is 4 characters and generally doesn't include a number, the Pactor call can be up to eight characters, and can be your regular call sign.

TXDAMTOR You may need to adjust the transmit pacing to allow for full power rise in the transciever

PTLISTEN allows you to listen to Pactor exchanges

PACTOR puts you in the Pactor standby mode - other stations can connect to you in Pactor mode

PACTOR Initiates a Pactor contact to the station with callsign

PACTOR ! Initiates a long path contact. This changes the chirp delays for a longer wait - it is also useful to try for very short distances.

The change codes are the similar to Amtor:

Crtl-c x to exit Pactor
Ctrl-c t to transmit
Ctrl-c e to return to standby or changeover
Ctrl-c d to disconnect

Nuthin to it!