[Elecraft] CW Rise Time?

[Paul Christensen]

> My call - K1ESE - is misinterpreted in CW as - K1EST - when  my keying
> is too soft.  I cured this on my Orion by setting the CW rise/fall time
> from 7ms to 5ms. I can't find the parameter to set the rise/fall time on 
> my K3.

John,

I found that in the last K3 F/W release (or perhaps the one just before it), 
the K3's CW rise/fall time is now roughly 2.5 ms compared to the previous 
5-6 ms.  I had to verify my scope settings on another time base to ensure I 
had not misinterpreted the measured result.

That being the case, it seems to me that the K3's CW envelope has gone 
through two evolutionary changes.  The first occurred a while back with a 
hardware fix and that mod is documented on the Elecraft website.  Prior to 
the fix, CW rise was about 8 ms or perhaps a bit longer.  After the hardware 
fix, the rise went to about 5-6 ms.  And now, we seem to be down to about 
2.5 ms.

Whether intentional or not by Elecraft, that is what I now measure on my K3. 
Perhaps this is not representative of other K3s.  Also, I do not detect an 
increase in the amount of keying sidebands with the faster ramping/decay. 
So, the ALC is still preserving the raised cosine function very well.

Long story short -- if Elecraft did in fact accelerate the ramping/decay 
time of the CW envelope down to about 2.5 ms, I can't imagine why anyone 
would want keying any harder and faster than that.  I am very happy with 
what I'm seeing.

Paul, W9AC