I have a love/hate relationship with RTTY. It's quite fun in non-pressure situations and I like a nice run in that mode every so often. But you'll never find me contesting in RTTY, that's for sure. DXing is a different beast. When you're working run-of-the-mill entities it's not hard, but pileups for the rare ones are insane since most DXpeditions focus on CW and SSB. I'm sitting at 317 entities confirmed on RTTY, all using FSK (never AFSK), and pretty well all of them at 1500W; at least all the rare ones. I'll still throw out my call with stock power every so often and see who replies.
I would strongly recommend to the original poster to look for an interface that allows true FSK keying, not AFSK. There are two huge reasons for this. First, with AFSK, you always have to remember to disable compression and turn down your mic gain so you don't overdrive it. Second, and this one is a bigger pain in the tuchus, when you're trying to work a DX station who's operating split, you'll see the QSX frequency posted on the cluster, but you have to remember to add 2.125 kHz to the spotted QSX. Using real FSK you don't worry about any of that. Even old RigBlasters will allow you to do real FSK, so skip the SignalLink and do it right.
And as one other posted mentioned, it's all about macros. No brag files on RTTY! I have only 5 macros for RTTY that I use regularly and they work great. Two for DXing and 3 for running. For DXing I use these two:
<mycall> <mycall> <mycall> K
DE <mycall> 599 TU. Some would argue I shouldn't even send my call in the reply but in RTTY it does help.
Running:
CQ CQ CQ de <mycall> <mycall> <mycall> PSE K
<hiscall> <hiscall> 599 <hiscall> BK
TU <mycall> QRZ UP (or just QRZ)
My macros also include TX/RX switching and logging each QSO, but that's the syntax that goes over the air. That's all you need. But what's funny is that you get into a pattern working a pileup like that, either calling-and-hoping or running a pile, but then someone breaks pattern and sends something unexpected. That's when I fumble for the TX button and start typing. The most fun one of those was Krish on VU4 and VU7 a while back. Pileups were insane, I'm using a 0x3 calling macro over and over for about an hour; I get through and Krish breaks his usual macro routine and says "HI PETER". Made my day. Heck, it made my month! I did fumble around and had to shake the macro-induced cobwebs out enough to fashion a live reply -- quickly.