[Elecraft] K CW-to-data wierdness

[Don Wilhelm]

LS,

I think you have discovered a bug that had not been seen before.  I took 
the liberty of forwarding it to Wayne and Lyle.

73,
Don W3FPR

lstavenhagen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I finally found something goofy in my K3 that may or not be a bug (questions
> below). CW-to-data can go into a confused state with imperfect keying. I
> noticed this yesterday during a PSK QSO using my paddles for transmit.
> Towards the end of a QSO, when I was sending rather poorly, hi hi, the rig
> suddenly exitted transmit and the sidetone became a continuous tone. I
> tapped the dit paddle and all was restored and I continued on. 
>
> Later I tried it into my dummy load to troubleshoot if it was just RF
> getting into the rig. I did find eventually that I was able to reproduce the
> behavior pretty consistently by sending a random series of dits/dahs into it
> without a break. I.e. in iambic mode, hold both paddles together (send
> aaaaa...), then release the dit paddle (tttttt), release the dah paddle
> (eeeeeee)... pretty soon the rig gets confused - the behaviors I've seen are
> exiting transmit with a continuous sidetone, exiting transmit with a
> continuous set of dits going on with no sidetone. 
>
> Hitting the paddle always seems to bring it back. 
>
> One possibility is that I'm inadvertently sending a known command to the
> encoder in the mess of dits and dahs and it's trying to do the right thing
> in the middle of it all. 
>
> So my questions would be:
> - are there 'hidden' commands to the encoder available in CW (i.e. like 'IM'
> to immediately switch to RX) and if so what would they be?
> - if I'm not just confusing it due to my own incompetence, is this an actual
> known problem?
>
> This mode does seem to work fine as long as your keying is spot on, so it's
> not a huge concern. But it is a little strange to me to be able to confuse
> it like this...
>
> Tnx es 73,
> LS
> W5QD
>