Dave,
I don't agree with your conclusion at all. It just takes practice. If
you're having trouble crank the filter width of the DSP to a narrow
setting and tune until the signal peaks. That will be close enough.
The extraneous signals from other stations and noise within wide filter
settings are much more of a problem than the on off nature of CW.
Having to accurately zero beat is much over rated, in my opinion.
The practice and "requirement" to zero beat really came from the old
days where rigs drifted like crazy. One had to start near zero beat to
have a chance to be heard. It wasn't at all uncommon to drift
completely out of the RX passband while calling a station. In fact,
older more skilled ops knew which direction the rig drifted. They would
include this knowledge and start calling off frequency so that the drift
would bring then to and through zero beat while calling. It also was
much more relevant when there was only a single answering station. Now
the name of the game is to stand out somehow-- be it strongest or most
in the clear.
"Call them where they are listening" really applies. I frankly don't
see the practicality of using the auto zero beat function when a station
is listening on ever changing frequencies that are not zero beat. Thus
there is also an "art" aspect to working stations.
Of course we're talking CW here. Interesting that nobody is
complaining about not being able to zero beat in SSB. I frankly find
that a much more challenging exercise. It certainly is mentally much
more complex. The algorithm seems to be tune until it sounds "right".
Same with CW.
One has to experiment to define "right"
73 de Brian/K3KO
David Woolley (E.L) wrote:
Tom Childers, N5GE wrote:
In the Army they taught us to turn on the spot signal and tune the
spot against
the received signal. When you hear the warbling stop, you are zero
beat on the
RX signal.
That's easy if you are trying to tune against a continuous carrier,
but you are normally tuning against a signal that is being 100%
amplitude modulated at about 10 to 30 baud (12 to 36 wpm). It gets
quite difficult to separate the amplitude modulation from the keying
from that from the beating.
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