[CQ-Contest] WPX CW Signal Quality Concerns

Tim Shoppa tshoppa at gmail.com
Tue Jun 9 09:59:12 EDT 2020


Just a decade ago, CW contest signals with extreme power supply ripple
(causing large sidebands +/-100, +/-300, +/-500 Hz but also out a longer
ways to kHz in worst cases) were extremely common from Europe. Today they
are rare to nonexistent and I think the efforts by contest organizers in
calling out these bad signals played a big part.

I have nothing against cleaning up CW keyclicks - for sure I was bothered
by them several times in WPX CW weekend - but on the impact severity scale
the RTTY Keyclicks made by JA rigs (or unupgraded K3's there may be some of
them still left) with FSK keying is way way worse than CW keyclicks. These
same guys go around bragging about how they do FSK keying so they have
perfect signals. W0YK's Contest University presentation is on-the-nose.

Tim N3QE


More information about the CQ-Contest mailing list