[Elecraft] A Feature I'd like to see

[Bill Coleman]

On 3/19/02 3:45 AM, W B Reese at barbara@radions.net wrote:

>The user could program it to look for "CQ," or if he was a contester 
>"TEST," or if he was on a sked, it would look for his callsign.  As it 
>stands now, the scan mode just stops on any signal.

Interesting.

About a decade ago, in the NCJ someone (I think it was N6TR) wrote about 
a program he called the VE8 sniffer. It was hooked to a TS430S and spent 
all it's time scanning up and down the band looking for a VE8/VY1 call. 
The idea was to try and locate a station in Yukon or Northwest 
Territories for the YU/NWT multiplier in the ARRL Sweepstakes CW.

The sniffer ran for hours, but never found a VE8 before the human 
operator did. At that point, he turned it off.

I don't think we've come very far since then in terms of recognising CW 
signals.

Realistically, if you want to do this, decoding a single CW signal 
through an audio bandpass isn't the way to go. The real way to do it is 
to build a special receiver that would take 5, 15, 50 or maybe 100 kHz at 
once and decode ALL the CW signals in the passband similtaneously.



Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr@arrl.net
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
            -- Wilbur Wright, 1901