[Elecraft] QSK? Newbie question

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

Maybe my Ham Band experience wasn't so typical. I was a CW operator at =
6th
Army HQ station K6USA, Fort Ord, CA in the late 50's and we did have
relay-controlled QSK. I could hear between characters at least. I recall
that it was very rare when I could actually use it with Ham operators on =
the
MARS nets. We had a notice posted on the console reminding new Army
operators to count to 10 before deciding the other station wasn't =
responding
in order to give the Hams enough time to throw all the switches.=20

That doesn't mean there weren't thousands of Hams with QSK of some sort =
and
they were justifiably proud of their achievement. What we take for =
granted
in a K2 was a LOT harder to do with the technology of the 1950s.=20

Ron AC7AC

-----Original Message-----

Many ham traffic handlers in the '50's (and earlier perhaps, but it was=20
before my time!) used full, "hear-between-the-dits" QSK.  The first=20
problem to solve was silencing the transmitter on key-up....  =
Timed-sequence
keying, where pressing the key turned the oscillator on=20
first and then activated following stages after a delay was a feature of =

some of the better commercial equipment (e.g., the Johnson Ranger), and=20
became popular in homebrew rigs as well.  My own homebrew rig had a=20
whole row of pots to adjust various aspects of shaping and timing.=20
Hetrodyne VFO's existed in the literature but were rare in actual use.
...
Vic K2VCO