[Elecraft] K3: re CW ID macro on SSB

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

I agree. As another OT from the days when A.M. was king, I've always
appreciated the clean simplicity of a real CW rig.

An interesting offshoot of this point was the use of MCW on the high seas.
Right up until CW was discontinued for emergency communications at sea in
the late 1990's, all shipboard CW rigs had to be able to send double
sideband AM MCW. That was a legacy from the days of spark, since spark was
self-modulated and could be copied on any AM radio, even a crystal set. MCW
was required for emergency calls to make sure every station within range
could copy, no matter how old or limited their equipment. 

The shipboard operators normally ran pure CW with the modulator turned off
for routine communications, but some liked to crank up the modulator
whenever they wanted to be noticed. Listened to on a normal CW receiver with
its BFO on, an MCW signal made a very distinctive cacophony of beat notes
between the sidebands and carriers and the BFO. 

It's one technique that I don't think would appreciated by today's Ham
operators fussing over CW signal bandwidths in the tens of Hz, even if it
wasn't illegal, Hi!

73,

Ron AC7AC

-----Original Message-----

OK .. I goofed. Can I blame it on learning all this stuff back in the
AM days? (when SSB stood for 'silly side band'.)

It still seems inherently wrong to take digitally recorded version of
a CPO output and use that in an attempt to create a CW signal. How
much distortion does the record/play back add to the signal? Was the
_original_ tone a good sine wave?

A CW transmitter is a simple thing, why make a complicated one?

Mark  AD5SS