Enhancements to NTS Procedures

The set of rules used by Delco ARES/RACES is based on the message passing rules used by the ARRL National Traffic System (NTS) and spelled out in their documentation:

• ARRL NTS Message Passing Guide – Chapter 1 – The ARRL Message Format

  • We don’t usually deal with ARRL Radiograms. So, this chapter is mostly useful as introductory information for Chapter 2
    

• ARRL NTS Message Passing Guide – Chapter 2 – Sending Messages on Voice

  • Chapter 2 defines how to voice various type of message content, such as numbers, initials, addresses, etc. Note: This is the most important chapter for our purposes.
    

The reader is encouraged to keep a copy of the NTS documentation (at least Chapter 2) along with this document and to refer to the NTS documentation where referenced.

In most cases, the procedures in this document are consistent with the NTS documentation. But there are two situations where we differ from the NTS documentation:

• When the NTS manual doesn’t account for messages written by third parties. This mostly applies to punctuation.
  • For example, the ARRL NTS documentation expects that the ARRL Radiogram is written by an NTS radio operator that knows to use their unique procedures. They use an “X” (capital X) for a period at the end of a sentence. But the messages we must send are written by third parties in normal English, with a period (“.”) at the end of sentences.
• When the NTS manual doesn’t have a rule that covers the situation.
  • For example, the ARRL NTS documentation doesn’t cover how to speak symbols or GPS coordinates and doesn’t account for the need to specify capitalization (such as in a web URL or a password).