[Elecraft] Firmware final?

[Guy Olinger K2AV]

That's right.  My CWT has gotten a little "spastic" since 4.51.  Saw that
right away with 4.51 in pre-beta.  But I'm not going to monkey with the
settings any more until Wayne publishes the fix.

4.51 was an absolutely splendid overhaul of AGC that fixed stuff that no
one could correlate with anything, and added marvelous clarity to multiple
signals with a lot of AGC action.  Seems that in DSP log functions that
there was a least significant digit "noise" any time AGC was active.  So
now anything that was internally calibrated or tuned to the specific
behavior of the old AGC now has lost the programmed "fit" that made the
function sharp.  The AGC had its shoe size change and now some of the old
function "boots" don't fit so good any more.

Pretty sure they have had the same list of "loose boot" functions since
pre-beta testing.  They need time to work on them, and it's been vacation
time.  I'll live with the spastic CWT until they get it fixed.  The move to
4.51 was because a lot of people wanted what was being talked about by beta
and pre-beta users of 4.51, but didn't want it unless it was production.

Folks who really need the text decoder for CW should use some of the later
PC programs which are able to do stable copy down into the noise and keep a
page of text in front of you.  In the last few years code copying software
has crossed a threshold into a realm of performance that challenges the
best human copy.  That kind of software can never fit into the tight
processing budget of a specialty processor in a portable HF rig.  At least
not with anything currently under manufacture at less than premium military
prices.

But Wayne will get to it.  He has a list.

Elecraft has a fix ratio on reported problems that is several orders of
magnitude beyond any other manufacturer of ham radio equipment.  Without a
doubt, the relatively tiny Elecraft is on a par with companies famous in
the commercial world for customer responsiveness, like SAS Institute, the
largest privately held software company in the world with over 10,000
employees.  SAS does it by spending very serious big-time budget bucks on a
huge technical support department where a lot of the staff have the same
kind of high end educational and experience backgrounds as the R&D folks
who design the things.  Many of the design changes COME FROM tech support
at SAS, sometimes with the coding changes, based on an accumulation of
customer needs gleaned out of the tech support calls.

I don't know how Wayne, Eric and company do it.  My gut guess of whether a
company the size of Elecraft doing a seriously technical product can do
Elecraft style support, upgrades and improvements, frankly, is that they
CAN'T do it.  And that is STILL my best guess, that a company Elecraft's
size just DOES NOT have the critical mass to pull it off .  They really
don't, not if they go home after 8 hours and get on with a private life.
 Takes people who would rather go to work than a ball game, and wake up in
the middle of the night with a new idea or a solution to a problem.  Or
read the reflector with their blackberry sitting on the throne on vacation,
and in the middle of the night. You folks be good to these guys and treat
them with some deferential respect.  They surely have earned it.

Back to the main topic

Wayne is working on it.
Wayne is working on it.
Wayne is working on it.
Wayne is working on it.

Oh, did you hear?

Wayne is working on it.

73, Guy.

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 6:18 PM, Fred Jensen <k6dgw at foothill.net> wrote:

> With 4.51, the operation of CWT seems to have changed [possibly in my
> mind and not in the radio :-)]  The indicator follows band noise
> somewhat erratically regardless of where I put the CWT threshold which I
> think is the same as the CW decode threshold.  On a signal, it will
> center and follow the signal as I tune.  I used to have it set so only
> strong noise pulses would make it appear until I was on a signal.  I
> don't know if it is related to the CW decode or not, but I'm wondering
> if it is just me.  I don't use the CW decode feature.
>
> 73,
>
> Fred K6DGW
> - Northern California Contest Club
> - CU in the 2012 Cal QSO Party 6-7 Oct 2012
> - www.cqp.org
>
> On 7/11/2012 8:48 AM, Wayne Burdick wrote:
> > CW decode will be improved in the next release of K3 firmware.
> > Meanwhile, try using a lower AGC threshold and a narrow filter
> > bandwidth.
> >
> > 73,
> > Wayne
> > N6KR
>
>
>
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