>do others feel that QSK above 25 WPM is a non-player anyway?
>
What meanest this? Above 25wpm is where you need QSK the most.
To me, sending cw without QSK is like shooting in the dark. Yes, one could
blindly babble billions of bits into the blue while unbeknowest to him, qrm
is present, the band is changing, your dx station went back to someone else,
a repeat is needed or comment needs interjecting. Meanwhile without QSK one
must be content with a totally one-way conversation.
The big question is why would anyone operate without QSK? I think the only
drawback is bad QSK. Clicky, mushy sidetones, loud relays, chopped
characters etc. These problems are enough to make anyone turn off their QSK
feature. Unfortunately, few rigs have clean, transparant sounding QSK.
My IC-706MKII has very fast QSK ..BUT..a very loud relay and the background
noise seems to increase to an ear splitting level between characters. I've
got the OMni 5 sounding pretty nice. So far, the smoothest QSK I've had was
my old TS-940s. My sidetone just sounded like another station on the same
frequency, absolutely awesome! I understand the 930 was similar. The
FT-1000mp of mine had a rather long delay and the sidetone stunk. Older
Tritons, Omni D's and Corsairs vary as to QSK performance. Generally they
recover fairly quickly, 8-10 ms. but not as fast as the Omni 5. Their
sidetones sound like ducks so many folks use external sidetones in their
keyers with good results.
Over and Out
N4LQ
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