One thing I found with winkey USB and a USB based serial port for CW input into
PowerSDR was intermittant timing issues. If I switched to a hardware based
serial port the issue went away.
On my USB bus I also had a mouse and a WIFI internet connection, so some of
these timing "issues" may in fact be related to traffic on the USB, or in the
Kernal and not related to the programs themselves. When you send CW you are
asking a virtual digital system to behave essentially like a real time analogue
activity that is almost entirely based in timing. You expect your key closure
to generate a signal that is almost simultaneous and with correct timing, but
if it exists among 2 dozen other processes sometimes the computer is not able
to make that happen. When I built my first keyer I wound up going to a ripple
counter and running the clock at 10X the speed and picking off the timing for
the flip flops from a divide by 10 count so I could average out some of the
variability. There was still minor variability, but it was so reduced that the
code sounded good. There were only 3 possible timing states in this system,
right on the nose a tiny bit
long and a tiny bit short. With the USB winkey system there are probably
dozens of possible states. There are likely times when all the little digital
errors add up to a really big error and it shows up as randomly noticeable in
the output.
73 W9OY
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