[UK-CONTEST] Computer free data contesting

[Stewart Rolfe]

Like some others on here I struggled to set up N1MM in time for last night's data CC...all forgotten from last year! So I decided to ditch the soundcard and the macros and check out the K3's cw to data gizmo - send cw from the paddle and have it magically converted to PSK or RTTY while reading the incoming on the (just) adequate scrolling LCD display.

It's really neat and I did the whole contest this way; the only automation being a CQ message in the K3's cw memory while the PC was used, but only as a dumb log keeper. You need perfect cw though so apologies for the occasional unexpected character on your screen. Will be interesting to see if anyone noticed any difference; I was sending mostly at 26wpm to try to keep the cw timing in hand and I guess this was lagging behind PC sent RTTY at 45 baud a good deal (45 Baud is about 60wpm..?) 

So quite an interesting evening but only 31 contacts. I did however stick to my decision to split the time 50:50 between PSK/RTTY and only squeezed 7 Qs from the PSK...!!; I felt inter UK paths from here were suffering from heavy phase distortion and copying most PSK signals was a problem. 

73,

Stewart, GW0ETF