[Elecraft] Noise Blanker

[T. David Yarnes]

I have a question, and probably I missed something already 
posted that would explain it.  I plead guilty to not reading 
all the posts as carefully as I probably should.

Anyway, this morning I found myself again dealing with the 
"Chinese radar" on 40 meter CW.  This thing comes and goes. 
It isn't there every day, but when it is there, it's loud! 
Previously I have been able to pretty much eliminate this 
interference just by engaging the noise blanker.  This 
morning, however, the noise blanker seemed to have very 
little effect on it.  I was able to eliminate some of the 
problem using the manual notch, but when you do that, you 
start creating problems with the CW signal you are trying to 
copy.  So, my question is, has there been a change in the 
firmware updates that would have possibly reduced the noise 
blanker's effect on this type of interference?  Currently I 
am using V. 1.75 firmware, as I decided not to update to 
1.78 after hearing about some of the issues it created.  I 
suppose it could just be that the radar signal itself 
varies, and that today it was such that the noise blanker 
couldn't deal with it.  I did try to go through all the 
various settings for the noise blanker, but nothing seemed 
to do any good.  Also, I may be imagining this, but it does 
seem that the noise blanker was better with the radar 
problem when I initially got my K3, but has progressively 
deteriorated somewhat.  But today it went from dealing with 
it very well (but not totally) on my last encounter, to 
having no real effect today.  Originally it seemed to wipe 
out the radar interference almost totally.

Dave W7AQK