Yes, Wayne has developed optimum CW shaping on both the K3 and the K2. It's more than just rise and fall times. The shape of the transition is important too.
But even a very simple cathode-keyed vacuum tube rig with minimal click suppression shouldn't produce anything significant out a 1 kHz or more away from the carrier. Another possible source of such clicks are linear amplifiers. Some fellows over-drive them, thinking it doesn't matter on CW, but an over-driven "linear" will distort the keying waveform too and may cause lots of splatter on CW just like they will on other modes. Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- That's not the problem. The crap I was hearing was often 2 to 3 KHz away, and from signals no louder than others on the band. On the other hand, I could slide up within less than 200 Hz of the guys with clean signals (even S9 plus 20 db or louder) and not even know they were there. Key clicks come from keying rise/fall times that are too fast. The big Yaesu rigs are notorious for this and unless a simple hardware mod (like the one described by W8JI) has been performed they are almost sure to badly trash up the band. My Icom 756Pro had adjustable rise/fall times, but the factory default setting was 2 msec (!!), and unless users of that series know to crank that out to something more like 6 msec those rigs will click also. There has been suspicions that some contesters purposely let their rigs generate clicks in order to create elbow room. Given the crud I hear from some pretty high profile contest stations, both DX and domestic, I'm inclined to believe it. Maybe somebody will record a full band spectrum sometime and software analyze it to publicize the worst offenders. >From what I understand, the rise/fall times on the K3 are set by hardware to 5 msec. Good job by Elecraft ... 73, Dave AB7E ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
