Topband: Coupla things

[Gary Smith]

As I usually do S&P in contests, I was tuning from 1.8 and going up, 
then repeating when there were no more CW signals. It's certainly 
possible there might be artifacts in this K3 but I wasn't using the 
DSP noise reduction nor the Noise Blanker. There were some very loud 
and powerful signals I came across that had no sign of clicks and 
some much less powerful S wise that were loaded with them. Most 
people had good signals but the ones that stood out covered both 
sides of their signal nicely. The ones that were obvious to me were 
obliterating the weaker signals near them.

Gary
KA1J

> Bob (K6NV) and I were having a off-list discussion and it got me
> wondering....
> 
> I heard some bad signals on the east coast here, but nothing
> memorable that I would describe as having keyclicks. I think I know
> what a keyclick is, I got lots of "OO postcards" in the mail for
> them and other maladies when I was a kid :-).
> 
> I would be surprised if things were much different on West coast.
> 
> Is it possible... that what folks are attributing to keyclicks in
> the transmitter, are actually AGC artifacts in their receiver?
> 
> There are several legal-limit contest stations within a few miles of
> me and I'm used to a strong-signal environment. And how it can pump
> AGC causing audible artifacts that are not in the transmitter. And I
> will generally disable AGC for anything but ear saving purposes. Why
> set AGC to make all signals sound the loudness as each other, or use
> AGC to make the noise be as loud as a signal?
> 
> I think it's possible that some of the modern DSP rigs may have
> unusual (impulse) AGC artifacts in a strong signal environment.
> Having noise blanker turned on may make keyclick-sounding artifacts
> too.
> 
> Tim N3QE