[Elecraft] re: Another urban legend: clicks needed for readability

[Guy Olinger, K2AV]

The modified and new K2's will soon speak for themselves.

Most of the arguments about needing clicks I heard referred to common
speeds in noise, rather than not being able to copy at all in good
conditions.

Personally I find needing a wideband clicky signal not to be true at
55 wpm which is my high end receiving these days. (I used to be able
to send that fast with a keyer. Those days are long gone.) I know that
is true because I do not lose intelligibility on high speed CW when I
turn my IF bandpass to 250 Hz on CW.

If keying artifacts beyond even as narrow as +/- 125 Hz were
necessary, I would lose intelligibility by using the 250 Hz bandwidth
setting, wouldn't I?

Very easy thing for the reader to experiment with. Fair amount of high
speed CW on 40 meters early in the morning. Even if you can't decipher
it that fast, think most can tell "mush" when they hear it.

Actually the harder thing to do is in the circuit: to produce a rise
time fast enough to support 70 wpm, and still round out the four
transition corners on a given dit/dah. And that's been designed for
us.

Your military gentleman was obviously trying to copy 70 wpm in an open
room, without headsets. Otherwise the "turning his head" would make no
sense.

I CANNOT copy 55 wpm without headsets, because the echoes from the
walls and hard objects in the room fill in the space between the dits
with echoes of the tones from the prior dits.

Thankfully, in any event 70 wpm is no useful speed for any contest
I've been in, though many operators complain they go too fast at 25
and 35.

73, Guy


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mike McCoy" <mikemccoy@austin.rr.com>
To: "Elecraft" <elecraft@mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2004 8:20 AM
Subject: [Elecraft] re: Another urban legend: clicks needed for
readability



Guy Olinger, K2AV wrote:

> It will also very quickly put an end to the urban
> legend that signals have to have a sharp wideband
> click on them for readability.


I have no idea if this is actually true or not since those able to
send/copy CW by hand at speeds above even 35-40 WPM seem almost
superhuman to me. I was once talking about CW to a gentleman that once
served as a CW operator in the military. He told me his record speed
for copying CW was 70 WPM. He also said that to copy at such speeds
you couldn't listen to the actual tone but instead had to tune away
from the signal until it was just 'clicks'.

Just offered as an anecdote and not as an 'argument' for/against
anything