Some personal thoughts from my experiences in CW rag chewing for the past 43
years. Round tables are fun. QSK is the only way to fly. That's why
telephones are duplex and folks sitting around talking in your living room
don't stick their fingers in their ears while making long monologs!
But, to prevent fatigue, you need a quiet background. This is best
accomplished NOT by turning down the RF gain, but instead by using extremely
narrow bandwidths. I use two 250 Hz filters in my Omni-6+ (one is the new
model 212 which is centered on a lower, 500 Hz CW tone). Then the PBT
control is adjusted for the low pitched side, and the DSP LP filter is set
for 600 Hz cutoff. The DSP noise reduction is always on, and CW off-set is
set for a 420 Hz tone. The result is a virtually silent background with a
nice soft nature to the lower pitched tones. Even QRN crashes are soft
sounding. In addition, the mind can more easily separate lower pitched CW
signals from one another than it can higher ones. This is because low tones
are numerically proportionally spaced further apart.
Enjoy, K6XK
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