[Elecraft] Hardware Noise Blanker on the K3

[Wes Stewart]

You are asking a question for which there is no good answer.

"Power line noise" can look almost like anything from an occasional pop when a piece of hardware moves, to full blown partial discharge (commonly called corona) that is continuous in nature.

Rather than discuss the nature of hardware blankers here, allow me to refer you with no modesty whatsoever, to a paper I wrote a long time ago. http://k6mhe.com/n7ws/Noise_Blanker.pdf

This is a 35-year-old design and time marches on, but the principles haven't changed.

In monopulse radar receivers, where the i-f is blanked during each transmitter pulse, and there are multiple i-f amplifiers that have to track in both phase and gain, we went to heroic efforts to design blanking gates that operated gracefully without a lot of blanking transient
 feed-through.  This stuff isn't trivial.

I haven't found that the K3 hardware blanker is particularly effective most of the time and at the wider settings it is susceptible to overload on big signals, but that is the nature of the beast. I will give it credit for being superior to the one in my TS-870 which is totally useless and a waste of a front panel push button, but that is damning with faint praise.

It's interesting that the best noise blanker in any commercial radio I've owned was in an old analog Yaesu FT221 two-meter multi-mode.  I don't know how they did it, but they did something right.

Wes  N7WS

--- On Sun, 6/13/10, Toby Pennington <toby423 at embarqmail.com> wrote:

From: Toby Pennington <toby423 at embarqmail.com>
Subject: [Elecraft] Hardware Noise Blanker on the K3
To:
 Elecraft at mailman.qth.net
Date: Sunday, June 13, 2010, 7:41 PM

Someone with power line noise.......does the hardware noise blanker work very well on s9 power line noise.  IF so,  is the SSB signal distorted ?  DSP blankers work to some extent but distort the audio.