Topband: Coupla things

[Tom W8JI]

>I thought the proper way of indicating clicks is with the signal report - 
>579k. I haven't heard this used in years.

No one does that now, and they especially will not do it in a contest.

> Remember all thise key click filter articles on the old QST?

Yeah, but they didn't do anything for over-the-air clicks. They eliminated 
key spark radiation, which was really just a local BCI issue. They won't do 
a thing for a modern rig, local or over the air.

Cleaning up transmitters with proper waveforms is actually relatively new. 
As a matter of fact the ARRL had the wrong waveform shown for a clean CW 
signal in all of their publications until just recently! Manufacturers only 
started with it in the past 10 years. For a large part, improvements have 
finally been made.

Also, what we notice depends a great deal on our local background noise and 
bandwidth used. Someone with an S8 background noise (and wide bandwidth that 
lets in a lot of noise power) is probably not going to notice what would be 
terrible with S1 background.

73 Tom