[Elecraft] Iambic Keying - Debunking the Myth

[Bill Tippett]

Iambic Keying - Debunking the Myth

by
Marshall G. Emm, N1FN

"Iambic or "squeeze" keying is one of the "Great Expectations" in CW operation.
Operators will agonize over a huge variety of 
features in electronic keyers, but
support for iambic keying itself is a given. But 
Iambic keying is really of very
limited value, and it's easy to become convinced that it was a BAD IDEA that
happened to catch on"

<MAJOR SNIP...full analysis in article below>

http://www.morsex.com/pubs/iambicmyth.pdf

"The Myth Exposed

The idea that iambic keying is more efficient has 
been around for a long time, and few operators
ever question it, even if they are having trouble 
doing it. They might blame themselves, or the
paddle, and it stops being fun. At first it does 
seem to have a certain “cool” factor, and no doubt
that’s why it was invented to start with. Some 
computer programmer looked at an electronic
keyer, realized that he was looking at logic 
states (dot is on or off, dash is on or off) and decided
to fill in the rest of the truth table– he was 
using “either a or b ,” and he was using “neither a nor
b” but he wasn’t doing anything with “both a and 
b.” In other words there was a third “switch”
that wasn’t being used. Not a bad idea on the 
face of it, and we’ve been paying the price ever
since.

Iambic keying became all the rage, and 
manufacturers got to make a bunch of new-fangled dual
paddles. Somewhere in there electronic keyer 
designers decided to offer “refinements” of the
basic principles, giving everybody Iambic A vs 
Iambic B to argue about, and distracting them
from any consideration of whether Iambic Anything 
was worth bothering with. It’s like saying
the emperor has no clothes, but I’ll say it 
anyhow– iambic keying is clever, and fun, but of very
little practical value. Worse, it can impose a 
speed limit on your sending, and ruin another
perfectly good amateur radio myth– the widely 
accepted notion that anyone can send twice as
fast as he can receive. But let’s talk about that one another time....."

         The fact that most High Speed Telegraphy contestants use
single paddle keys (i.e. non-iambic) is further proof of the above.

                                 73,  Bill  W4ZV