[UK-CONTEST] Perseus and Skimmer

[Clive Whelan]

The Perseus is- as you may know- a superb quality receiver, but is not 
viable for real-time contest work because of the ca 250mS tx/rx latency- 
well not for QRQ or QSK CW anyway which is all I am qualified to judge upon.

Skimmer is an amazing piece of technology which makes telnet/clusters 
redundant at a stroke. I may be telling you stuff you already know here, 
please excuse me if so.

However there is a fundamental incompatibility between the two in as 
much as there is no matching sample rate. I might be wrong but it seems 
to me that there is not a fundamental technical issue here, just 
reluctance of two vendors to agree common standards. Whatever might be 
the truth of the matter, these two outstanding products cannot be used 
directly together which is really a shame.

N6TV has devised a workaround for this issue ( see his qrz.com page), 
but this involves the use of two additional pieces of software viz 
Ratemonkey and Virtual Audio Cable, either or both of which may be paid 
for software. Speaking as a cybernetically challenged curmudgeon I am 
loathe to add any further complications to my already overburdened 
station. I am however mindful of the fact that  K3LR has recently 
adopted a bank of six Perseus receivers in their M/M mega station ,so 
the principle must be pretty sound. They however have the luxury of 
dedicated hardware and software engineers at their disposal and I have 
only the one who also shares the operating duties!

I am therefore soliciting any real world UK based opinions of the set-up 
described above, and whether I could really make it work.

73


Clive
GW3NJW