VOA Radiogram during the weekend on 13-14 July 2013 included this sequence:

(1) Greetings to the Mexico City meeting of shortwave listeners in MFSK32 plain-text Spanish

(2) Same greetings to the Mexico City meeting in MFSK32 formatted for Flmsg (a message handling program that works with Fldigi).

(3) MFSK32 image publicizing the Mexico City meeting

(4) VOA News story about Pluto’s moons in MFSK32 plain-text MFSK32 Spanish

When I decoded from recordings and from the actual broadcasts, the Spanish accents displayed correctly from (1) but never from (4), even though the character set was still UTF-8. The only way to restore the accents was to close Fldigi and and turn it back on during (4). Why was this happening?

Using audio editing software, I deleted (2) and (3) and decoded from what remained. The accents displayed correctly on both (1) and (4).

Then I played (1), (2) and (4). The accents were no longer visible on (4).

Finally I played (1), (3) and (4). The accents were visible on (4).

The culprit is Flmsg. Something in the Flmsg code alters the character set. Whatever that may be, I’ll just avoid text containing diacritics after using Flmsg on the program.      

Looking at reception reports from the past weekend, some listeners had this problem with the accents, and some did not. I have no idea what caused the difference.

Later in the program, during the story about the O3B broadband system in Africa, some of you saw — where there should have been apostrophes. This is because I forgot to change each print-style ’ to the typewriter-style
’ before encoding the story. The print-style ’ requires UTF-8, which had been lost, for some of us, after the Flmsg item.

See also this item about the VOA Radiogram message to the Encuentro Nacional Diexista 2013 en Ciudad de México.

And this is what the Flmsg greeting to the Mexico City meeting looked like: