[Elecraft] CQ Contest

[xdavid at cis-broadband.com]

That's not the problem.  The crap I was hearing was often 2 to 3 KHz away, and from signals no louder than others on the band.  On the other hand, I could slide up within less than 200 Hz of the guys with clean signals (even S9 plus 20 db or louder) and not even know they were there.

Key clicks come from keying rise/fall times that are too fast.  The big Yaesu rigs are notorious for this and unless a simple hardware mod (like the one described by W8JI) has been performed they are almost sure to badly trash up the band.  My Icom 756Pro had adjustable rise/fall times, but the factory default setting was 2 msec (!!), and unless users of that series know to crank that out to something more like 6 msec those rigs will click also.

There has been suspicions that some contesters purposely let their rigs generate clicks in order to create elbow room.  Given the crud I hear from some pretty high profile contest stations, both DX and domestic, I'm inclined to believe it.  Maybe somebody will record a full band spectrum sometime and software analyze it to publicize the worst offenders.

>From what I understand, the rise/fall times on the K3 are set by hardware to 5 msec.  Good job by Elecraft ...

73,
Dave   AB7E



------Original Mail------
From: "Ron D'Eau Claire" <ron at cobi.biz>
To: "'Richard Davis'" <richard at aroundwood.com>,
    "'Elecraft Reflector'" <elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 08:04:03 -0700
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] CQ Contest


Putting a strong signal near the edge of a filter bandpass can create those
"clicks" in your own receiver. Generally, the sharper the filter (steeper
the skirt) the stronger the clicks that may be produced. 

Ron AC7AC