[TenTec] O2 Keyer

[Grant Youngman]

> You've got me intrigued now, Don - I may plug my paddles into 
> the Orion this weekend (in between bouts in the BARTS 
> contest) and try that keying out for myself. 

I've found a lot of this O-2 keyer discussion interesting.

My take on it is that it doesn't take but a very small change in keyer
timing requirements to throw things off.  We're creatures of habit if
nothing else -- I suspect like a pianist plays Czerny's "The School of
Velocity", we send CW out of very low levels of the brain, and perhaps lower
than that.  There are no "fore-brain" functions involved once we get past
language and down to the level of finger twitch on the paddles.

Until a few years ago, I'd been using a WB4VVF Accu-Keyer with auto
character spacing that I built back in the 70's after the first article
appeared in QST.  Although I tried to update several times, everthing else I
tried "had timing problems".  I finally bought a K4, and even though it has
an "accu-keyer" emulation mode, it still just wasn't quite the same as the
original.  I almost went back to my little homebrew box.

Ultimately, I bit the bullet and spent enough time with the K-4 to retrain
myself.  So, although it was slightly broken when I got it, it magically
works fine now :-)

Don't really know if there's actually an issue with the keyer code in the
Orion/II or not, 'cuz I don't use it.  But perhaps it just requires
"familiarity" to fix whatever bug seems to be there ....

Grant/NQ5T