[Elecraft] Personalizing CW with the K Line

[EricJ]

I wouldn't intentionally develop an idiosyncratic fist to make me stand 
out, but in the 60's I could identify all of my regular on the air ham 
friends by their individual fists without every hearing a call.

The main characteristic of the Lake Erie swing was dots send at about 40 
wpm and dashes at whatever the op chose. It was easy to send very fast 
dots with a bug (being automatic!), but dashes were much slower for most 
operators. I think the rationale was the 40 wpm dots brought the overall 
speed up, even though the op was still sending dashes at a lower capability.

Eventually, though, I think the LE swing just became a dialect that 
propagated through a particular set of operators (Erie Canal for LE 
swing and marine ops for banana boat swing?), and spread from there. It 
may not even have been any more efficient--it was just the way you sent 
in a particular group to identify yourself and be accepted. The same way 
that non-Southerners start using y'all all over the place an hour after 
they land at a Southern airport.

I don't have a K3, so I don't know if it can be set up to replicate an 
LE swing. It could if you can independently vary the speed of dots and 
dashes. You wouldn't have the sometimes difficult corruption of random 
extra dots and weird variations in dash length, but you could have the 
best of LE swing which was the lilt and charm of the faster dots. If I 
were to try it, I'd probably set dash length to 20 wpm equivalent and 
dot to 40 wpm. It would be fun to try, but not everyone likes to hear a 
Lake Erie swing--or Southern accents for that matter.

Eric
KE6US



On 7/4/2014 1:23 PM, Dauer, Edward wrote:
> Eric --
>
> Thanks for sharing the recordings.  I've heard fists somewhat like that
> but none quite so distinctive.  I tried to figure out what makes the swing
> sound the way it does.  I don't have a scope or any other device to
> visualize or capture it, so this is just by ear - it seems that his dahs
> are much more than three times as long as his dits, and that the leading
> dah in a character that begins with a dah is longer than the following
> dahs.  Maybe someone with the right equipment (and the time to spend on
> it) could do a better analysis.  I would be interesting to know.
>
> Both the K3 and the KX3 allow for some personalization (as do many other
> rigs), by changing the weight ratios -- i.e. the ratios of dit length to
> dah length and of the element length to the inter-element spacing.  There
> may be other variables in the F/W as well that I haven't looked at.  I
> have never played with it, being an old stick-in-the-mud 3:1 curmudgeon;
> but I've wondered whether an idiosyncratic weighting would help make a
> signal stand out in a pile-up or make for better copy in the QRM . . .
> Anyone know?
>
> Ted, KN1CBR
>
>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 29
>> Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2014 12:39:43 -0700
>> From: EricJ <eric_csuf at hotmail.com>
>> To: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
>> Subject: Re: [Elecraft] [OT] Jim's Dot Stabilizer
>> Message-ID: <BLU436-SMTP8155203C73C82AAA50D1B38E000 at phx.gbl>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"; format=flowed
>>
>> Here's a couple of recordings of W0BMU and the Lake Erie swing that Buzz
>> mentions. Listen online or d/l them. The bands used to be full of
>> interesting and quirky fists and styles like this. Not unlike speech
>> patterns some were quite beautiful, some were in-your-face obnoxious.
>> That was before non-meat code readers and (gakk!) keyboards.
>>
>> I always thought the Lake Erie swing was easy to copy in the speed range
>> of most ham QSOs. It has an informal chatty feel to it.
>>
>> Anyway, for those who want to remember and for those who never knew:
>>
>> https://archive.org/details/W0bmuHowardtexHarveyW0bmu
>>
>> Eric
>> KE6US
>>
>>
>>
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