[Elecraft] Bigger K3 S-meter

[Craig]

Hi Guy

It seems that the consensus is that a pretty innacurate S-meter is ok.

I dont know why everything related to ham radio has to be reduced to the bare minimum or  be in the totally useless category. Not everyone's ham radio life revolves around  giving out cookie cutter signal reports. 

Most people  would not buy any piece of test equipment with  300% inaccuracy. I could just imagine all the shouting if power meters had   a tolerance of +- 200% or likewise VSWR meter.  S meters should be no different. 

A calibrated S meter could be useful tool in many other ways.

- Measuring  field strength and patterns of antennas.

- Reporting on things like BPL and other radiated and conducted measurements that seem to be a daily threat on HF. Just knowing they close to  S9 plus plus minus 20 db is not a professional way to build an argument against such pollution in professional circles. Having a calibrated S meter  and adding something a like calibrated loop with a known antenna factor would make collecting and surveying potential RF pollution data very easy. While we don't need 0.1 db accuracy 1 db of accuracy is easily achieved in SDR radios.

http://www.vk1od.net/bpl/QueanbeyanBplTrial2.htm

- Using a good S-meter would also be a reliable  way of surveying a potential new QTH. The data could be used to compare signal noise levels to the thermal noise floor, or even compare what you are measuring to the surveyed ITU noise levels on HF.  It would be nice knowing that your potential new QTH  is in a QRM silent location. It would also be good comparing noise floors amongst hams for various locations.

- It would also be useful knowing how accurate and reliable propagation programs are on a daily basis since they do predict signal levels.  This might come in handy if one wanted to build a DSP  based DF system which relies on ionospheric data.

- As a general level meter around the shack, it could even be used as an accurate power meter.

So to me a well calibrated S-meter can take  the place of many expensive instruments that most hams dont have access to on a daily basis. It is a very useful tool. When  we use some sort of absolute reference our understanding of what we are  measuring on a daily basis  increases our understanding of what we are doing in our hobby.

While we on this subject if further work is carried out on the K3's s-meter  you might as  well follow the IARU's recommendation for S-meters and make it quasi peak in nature.

Besides these days, with the  competition increasing in the new radio market with radios like the Perseus, ADAT and the newly released cheap Flexradio models, all which offer a very accurate S-meters as a feature. It would do no harm to the K3's reputation  having a feature that some consider desirable, that's marketing not  rocket science.


73
Craig

--- On Fri, 10/31/08, Guy, K2AV <olinger at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> From: Guy, K2AV <olinger at bellsouth.net>
> Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Bigger K3 S-meter
> To: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
> Date: Friday, October 31, 2008, 12:05 PM
> I would just like to see signal strength, including noise,
> in absolute
> reference levels. In particular when listening to a local
> while turning a
> beam kind of thing.  Although that can be done relatively
> with the audio
> voltage level, it wouldn't allow me to tell a local
> that his ground wave
> signal has gone down 3 db and is staying there, or be able
> to create data
> for studies over time.  
> 
> Since it is an SDW, such is possible.  dBuv is fine.  Might
> need linearity
> points as part of the package which could be calibrated
> with a precision
> attenuator. 
> 
> 
> Changing the functionality of the BG or SM commands so they
> could provide
> greater resolution *would* break software, which is what I
> was saying. But
> while I can see that having software access to the dBm
> reading could be
> useful for antenna measurement purposes, given the vagaries
> of propagation I
> would have thought that a 1 S-unit resolution was perfectly
> adequate for
> normal purposes. I cannot see how it would be more useful
> to be told I am
> S6.5 rather than S6 or S7, or even S5 or S8! Whatever the
> reading is it is
> going to be different 20 seconds later anyway.
> 
> 
> -- 
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> http://n2.nabble.com/Bigger-K3-S-meter-tp1399030p1437492.html
> Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 
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