[Elecraft] K3 CW Decoder, Not very good

[Bill VanAlstyne W5WVO]

So that begs the question, I suppose -- is CW sent by a keyer with paddle 
machine-sent or hand-sent? It's actually both, of course. Some of the 
metrics are controlled by logic (hardware and/or software), but 
inter-character and inter-word spacing are controlled by the human operator. 
In my experience, this is usually enough to screw up the K3's decoding 
algorithm. And of course once you start talking about bug-sent or 
straight-key-sent code, that's another planet altogether.

Developing a really "brainy" hand-sent CW decoder would be very challenging, 
to say the least -- and even if you could do it, it would almost certainly 
require way more number-crunching horsepower than is available in the K3's 
processor. It's one of those things that fall under the label, 
"Theoretically possible, but why bother?" There are many much more useful 
machine-generated digital encoding methods available today. I think Morse 
code decoding should probably be allowed to remain in the wetware domain. If 
you "need" a CW decoder, let me suggest that PRACTICE has been known to work 
very well when applied consistently. :-)

Bill W5WVO

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Don Wilhelm" <w3fpr at embarqmail.com>
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2010 9:06 PM
To: "Joe Reaves" <w7joe at yahoo.com>
Cc: "elecraft mail" <elecraft at mailman.qth.net>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] K3 CW Decoder, Not very good

> Joe.
>
> If you are trying to decode hand sent CW. you will likely have to
> provide a lot of "fills" unless the sending operator is quite skilled at
> timing and spacing.  Machine sent (keyboard or computer) CW should be
> easily decoded.
>
> 73,
> Don W3FPR
>
> Joe Reaves wrote:
>> Hello friends,
>> I have been trying to get my K3 decoder to work better by trying,
>> cutting back on the RF gain, using narrow filtering, to limit noise.
>> tuning back and forth across the signal to find a good copy spot.
>> Just can't seem to get it to read very well no matter what I try...?
>> Even strong signals don't seem to read very well... Is there a way to
>> improver the cw code reader / decoder in the K3 ?
>> Thanks, Best 73' Joe R. / W7Joe
>>
>>
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