[SCCC] CW Skimmer

[John Graf]

I downloaded CW Skimmer on Friday and ran it for a few hours during CQ 
WPX this weekend.  This is not an in-depth review or analysis, but I 
wanted to share my impressions.  As is always the case, your mileage may 
vary.

First of all, when I am running a frequency I really need to 
concentrate.  I don't have the mental agility or the CW skills to be 
watching a CW decoder, and in fact I think my eyes are closed half the 
time.  So for that part of the contest it was useless.

When doing S&P, I normally use the CW decoder (RTTY-rite) that comes 
with Writelog.  The main reason for this is that I can instantly see if 
a station is a dupe (shows in red) or a needed mult (shows in yellow).

So for a while I switched that off and ran CW Skimmer.  What CW Skimmer 
does really well is parse out call signs from all the noise.  At this 
point you have two choices.  If you set it to only report "validated" 
calls, it will only display calls that it has heard twice.  If you set 
it to receive all calls, you quickly fill the screen with bogus calls 
that it picked up from the random noise.

So, for S&P you want to run it with "validated" calls only.  That works 
fine, but the software does not tell you which stations are dupes and 
which are needed mults.   I switched back to Writelog pretty quickly.

To be fair, I was only watching 2.8 kHz of the band as that is all I can 
get from the K3.  If I had a some sort of software-defined receiver, 
such as a Softrock, I could watch up to 192 kHz of the spectrum.   That 
would give you a lot more useful information.  You could then click on a 
call sign and instantly tune your rig to that call's frequency.

So now that I have played with the program and seen its capabilities 
first-hand, I have reached a couple of conclusions:

1.  It is not for me.  With my equipment and my operating habits, it did 
provide any advantage whatsoever.  I think most people who are running 
CW Skimmer with a narrow bandwidth will agree, and will probably not use 
it.

2.  If you are using it with a  wide-bandwidth receiver, it gives you 
information that is similar to a packet cluster.  On the one hand you 
can only view a single band, which is a disadvantage relative to a 
cluster.  On the other hand, it is real-time (an maybe more accurate) 
information, which is an advantage over a cluster.

3.  Based on that, I do not think CW skimmer should be banned, but I do 
think that CW skimmer should put you in the Assisted category.

I would be interested to hear from anyone else who tried CW Skimmer in 
this (or any) contest.

Thanks and 73,

John, WA6L