[RTTY] RTTY Now trashy signals

[aflowers at frontiernet.net]

Al,
 
I respectfully disagree in small detail (and please forgive me if I misunderstood).  I think everyone owns equal responsibility for his or her signal *regardless of the process creating it*.  We make the decision to either trust that the manufacturer has implemented the feature properly and we choose use it, or we choose to do it by other means.  Contesters are always making decisions like this.  Really capable people will measure the things that matter to them, if they can, and the magazines try to publish product reviews to help us out.  In the final analysis we make a good choice or we make a bad choice based on available information, but either way we make the choice and we are responsible for the signal we put out.  Sometimes getting a new radio may be the only viable option, and that is expensive, and yes, we will be upset at the manufacturer for giving us a raw deal.
 
I think your main point is that "the transmitter made me do it" isn't a justification for keeping on doing it.  Spot on, in my opinion.
 
I think that begs a really important question though: is there any meaningful difference among the FSK signals generated by different radios' internal FSK generators.  Forget whether it's done by switching the LO frequency, by magical DSP fairies, or by black and white mice spinning the mark and space wheels next to the flux capacitor:  *among the internal FSK generators in the K3, IC-7800, FT-1000MP, and IC-706, or any radio made in the last 15 years, is there any meaningful difference when it comes to the RF coming out?*
 
If so, what are the differences?  Anyone have pictures of radios side by side when keyed in their "FSK" mode?
 
Andy K0SM/2
 
 
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Which was basically my point.  Discounting analog FSK implementations from 30 years ago, there is nothing you, Joe Ham,  can do should it be proved that, yes indeed, your 2 year old DSP transceiver is splattering when modulated using FSK.  There are no user accessible adjustments and with the few DSP designs I've looked at there are no internal hardware adjustments either so you can probably safely attribute the problem in that case to bad design.  Which has no cure except to buy a different model radio.

A ham running AFSK owns a lot more responsibility for the cleanliness of his signal than one running FSK in the sense that AFSK performance is more dependent on user configuration.

Al
AB2ZY

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