[Elecraft] Firmware final?

[JP O'Connor]

Amen, Guy!

I was shocked to receive an email from Wayne on a... Sunday... on Mother's
Day no less! Well, it was late afternoon, so I guess it was OK. ;-) Another
one came in very late at night.

I suppose you can tell I was a new customer at the time (KX3 #0130) and
didn't know any better than to not be surprised.

Now I keep the Kool-Aid pitcher close at hand. You bums got me hooked.


On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 1:15 AM, Guy Olinger K2AV <olinger at bellsouth.net>wrote:

> 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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