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Re: [CQ-Contest] Key Clicks

To: cq-contest@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Key Clicks
From: Jim Brown <k9yc@audiosystemsgroup.com>
Reply-to: k9yc@arrl.net
Date: Thu, 4 Jun 2020 22:14:21 -0700
List-post: <mailto:cq-contest@contesting.com>
On 6/4/2020 3:30 PM, Jim McCook wrote:
I purposefully avoided naming the radios that I noticed had the clicks. I think people should discuss that off line.

I strongly disagree, Jim. Until those making the buying decisions are aware of what'd dirty and what's clean, we're going to continue to have this problem.

A major contester in the Northwest was tearing me up with clicks this weekend, and I emailed him about it. He responded that he had an IC7800, that keying risetime was set for the fastest, 4 msec, and asked me what he should be using. I told him the longest (slowest) setting.

My comments about clicks and splatter are based on listening and looking at keying bandwidth and SSB modulation bandwidth on a calibrated waterfall. The material on my website is based on ARRL Lab data (which they sent me electronically for many of the radios) and my own measurements.

Rob Sherwood has done the ham community a great service with his extensive measurements of receiver performance, and the result has been much better receivers. It's long past time to have cleaned up transmitters! Almost any time I tune the phone bands, I see a disturbing fraction of signals with splatter taking up as much spectrum each side of their signal as the signal itself. I've called or emailed or contacted on the air lots of guys with these dirty signals, and with few exceptions, the splatter is coming out of the rig, not the amp. And each time the culprit has been a low to moderate cost fairly recent production (within 5 years, and current) Yaesu rig.

Simply put, running a rig, especially in a contest, that has clicks and/or splatter is being a VERY bad neighbor, and the fact that it has a great receiver is no excuse!

73, Jim K9YC
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