[CQ-Contest] RX Heresy? - Key Clicks

[Dave - AB7E]

I've had my K3 for about a year now, and for CW contests I typically use the 250 Hz 8-pole roofing filter (which is actually something over 300 Hz wide) and have the DSP set to 300 Hz.  Key clicks have now become my biggest complaint ... I can slide up to within 200 Hz of an S9+20 signal and never hear him if he has a clean signal, but key clicks are often much wider than that.  Given the number of truly horrible clicks coming from some of the more active contesters out there, I'm of the opinion that many of them do it intentionally to give themselves more elbow room.  It makes me wonder if that would prevent those guys from ever buying a K3, since Elecraft has wisely (in my opinion) made the CW waveform fixed ... it cannot be adjusted by the user.

I would love to see someone write an SDR application that decoded callsigns and measured key click energy (energy outside a predefined bandwidth) as a percentage of the total signal for each callsign.  CW Skimmer, for example, can display SNR for a signal ... wouldn't it be neat if it had the option to measure key clicks instead?

73,
Dave  AB7E



------Original Mail------
From: "Bill Tippett" <btippett at alum.mit.edu>
To: <cq-contest at contesting.com>
Sent: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:02:44 -0500
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] RX Heresy?



The good news for all of us is that every time someone switches, the
bands become cleaner for everyone (clicks, phase noise, etc).

73,  Bill  W4ZV

http://www.eskimo.com/~mwdink/3830/