[UK-CONTEST] Computer free data contesting

[Peter Hobbs]

Stewart

Last night was a second go for me using this mode.  The impression I 
have is that the K3 struggles with PSK in a busy band, even when the 
filter is optimised and the RF gain is backed off.  I reverted to RTTY 
after 2 PSK QSOs in 20 minutes at the start but then had slightly better 
luck in the last half hour, with 13 in all.

 It's hard to escape the CW habit of sending "TT1" etc. and making sure 
that words don't run together (K3 seems to need a bit of extra time 
before it decides that a space is intended), so rather less relaxing 
than CW.  Logging keeps you on your toes too, not to miss those serials 
that sail by and are then lost for ever!  Definitely a skill to be 
honed, but good fun nonetheless.

Thanks to those stalwarts who pandered to me!

73, Peter G3LET

Stewart Rolfe wrote:

>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 
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