I spent about 6 hours on each of the two days. This time I decided to do a single band entry, 20m, as my antennas are not good on the lower bands.
This was the first time I operated using 100W instead of QRP. Interestingly the number of contacts I made was not that much greater than last year when I used QRP, though I managed to log a few more rare multipliers. I was using KComm as my logging program, with macros for all the contest exchanges. I operated the whole contest without touching the key once, apart from to load some messages into the K3 memories as a backup in case the computer crashed in the middle of a contact, as happened during the WPX when RF caused it to freeze. No such problems this time. I was impressed with how well the K3 CW decoder worked even on very high speed transmissions. I had Fldigi running to help decode some of the stations that send faster than I can easily copy but it was not much help in practise. However, on occasions when I tuned in what sounded like a burst of machine gun fire I looked over at the K3 and it had decoded the transmission when Fldigi hadn't. I didn't have CWT enabled and made no special effort to zero beat the signal, but if it was within the filter passband the K3 could usually decode it. I didn't trust the decoder completely but usually once I had an idea what the call was supposed to be I was able to confirm it in my head, so it was quite helpful. A couple of stations lost out on a point from me because they were sending so fast that neither the K3 nor I could copy them. Why do people do this? Surely the number of contacts lost because people like me who are not CW wizards just can't copy them must negate the benefit of any time saved? These stations were repeatedly calling CQ and if I could have read them we could have easily had a contact. There were a lot of key clicks in evidence and in a couple of cases the key clicks were so strong that they actually depressed the AGC so that I had to abandon trying to copy a couple of weaker stations. The widest bandwidth I used was 200Hz but sometimes it was down to 150Hz or 100Hz. However the narrowest roofing filter I have is 500Hz. If I had a narrower filter, such as 200Hz, would that have helped in this situation? ----- Julian, G4ILO. K2 #392 K3 #222. http://www.g4ilo.com/ G4ILO's Shack http://www.ham-directory.com/ Ham Directory http://www.g4ilo.com/kcomm.html KComm for Elecraft K2 and K3 -- View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/K3-and-CQWW-tp1597892p1598265.html Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
