> An undershoot of ~ 20% for the first few seconds of > transmission on a > new frequency might be an irritant but an overshoot or > aggressive fast > acting ALC leads to spatter on peaks, this is very common > issue on the > bands today > An undershoot of ~20% on peaks (it's less on my K3) is > negligible in > terms of the receiving end signal strength and a small > price to pay for > a cleaner transmitted signal.
I think overshoot on SSB is greatly overplayed in most radios. There are some truly bad radios, but even in them the overshoot is very short duration. It often won't even show a regular peak reading meter. It is generally a few milliseconds at most from a "cold" start with no ALC, and then it is gone until the next nearly zero ALC drop. The result from ALC on SSB is an occasional very short syllabic tic. A couple milliseconds of spit or tic once every few seconds is not a big deal breaker. The real annoying crud, and bands like 20 are full of it, is caused by improper loading of amplifiers, poorly designed amps, and overdriving amps. It's the constant spitting and sputtering that wipes out entire words that is damaging, and I don't see the real damaging stuff changing much with work on ALC systems. There are also the occasional phools who get inside radios and crank the power limit controls up. I know this because I repaired the FT1000MP's of a contester, set the power pots back to 100 watts where the radio was about -35 dB PEP on 3rd order, and six months later when I was doing a filter mod to the same radios the power pots were back up to 140 watts where the radios have -20 dB PEP on IM3. Someplace between the two is probably a good compromise, but don't bank on 20 meters and other bands cleaning up if all the ALC's in the world were fixed. 73 Tom ______________________________________________________________ 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
