[WriteLog] CW direct keying

[Joe Subich, W4TV]

Darren,

If your interface is USB based try some of all of the following:

Open Windows Device Manager and select the COM port created by
your interface.  Double click to open Properties, select the Port
Settings tab and click "Advanced".

1) try reducing the Transmit and Receive buffer sizes - with CW
    and software FSK you are only transferring a very few bytes
    at a time.  The default 4096 byte buffers may be too big.
2) Reduce the "Latency Timer"
3) increase the Write Timeout slightly
4) Make sure "Serial Printer" and "Enable Selective Suspend"
    are *NOT* checked.

Finally *never* use bit banged CW or FSK if you have a mass storage
device connected - including "thumb" or "jump" drives, external USB
hard drives or optical drives, USB camera, etc.  Mass Storage devices
set very large buffers and high Latency Timer ("slot size") to optimize
large data transfers and can greatly impact the fine timing necessary
for accurate CW or RTTY.

Note much of this has been posted in the past and part of it may be in
the WriteLog help files.

73,

    ... Joe, W4TV


On 2014-07-09 3:51 PM, Darren Collins (G0TSM) wrote:
> I re-hooked up the direct keying interface and tried changing the
> priority in the Windows task manager, but it made no difference, same
> issue kept cropping up, even with anti-virus disabled on the
> near-vannilla Win7 32bit installation. Incidentally it is the same for
> RTTY but is harder to hear the problem when TXing, the rtty QSOs were
> taking longer due to callers repeating their exchanges as I was sending
> un-decodable replies.
> As a test I tried Logger32 directly keying the same interface in CW and
> RTTY (it's a dual rtty/cw direct keying interface) and that ran smoothly
> so i'll need to do some more investigating.
>
> 73 Darren G0TSM
>
>
>
> On 06/07/2014 21:59, Darren Collins (G0TSM) wrote:
>> Wayne,
>> Thanks for replying... Luckily the Winkey unit has sprung back into
>> life after being disconnected for 24hrs, but i'll try your suggestion
>> on direct keying tomorrow.
>>
>> 73 Darren (SV5/)G0TSM
>>
>> On 06/07/2014 18:30, Wayne, W5XD wrote:
>>>> my Winkey compatible interface has failed, luckily
>>>> I have a spare directkeying interface which is just an
>>>> opto-isolater type. It works fine but everynow and then
>>>> it will just go crazy and it sounds like rig is being
>>>> keyed very fast with rough choppy CW.
>>> This is a tough one. The reason WinKey exists is exactly the situation
>>> you're in. Its not COM port settings that are your problem. Your
>>> problem is
>>> tasks that Windows thinks are higher priority than WriteLog and its CW
>>> timers. It might be possible to track them down, but its not easy. I
>>> would
>>> start with virus checkers--turn them all off. (Why? they tend to install
>>> themselves as being higher priority than anything else on the machine.)
>>>
>>> I would at least have a look at the Processes tab of the Windows Task
>>> Manager (right click in your Start Menu bar, and choose Task manager)
>>> and
>>> sort by "CPU". See if something is running that you recognize and see
>>> if you
>>> an figure out how to turn it off.
>>>
>>> You might even try sorting that same panel by Image Name, find
>>> WriteL32.exe,
>>> right click on it, and raise its priority. I have never tried that.
>>> But I
>>> don't think it can hurt anything.
>>>
>>> Wayne, W5XD
>>>
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>>
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