[Elecraft] P3 cw waterfall

[Jim Brown]

On Wed,12/9/2015 1:10 PM, Barry N1EU wrote:
> Is the waterfall speed adjustable?

Sure.

> Any brilliant insights on optimal cw waterfall setup gratefully
> appreciated!

I don't use the waterfall to copy CW, I use it to find weak signals, and 
to find empty holes in a crowded band. For that, I set the top of the 
display for maximum averaging, and I set the waterfall as slow as it 
will go. I set the display height to 24 dB for day to day operation, and 
42 dB in contests (and DX pileups).  I set the bottom of the display so 
that an empty channel shows up as tiny flecks of noise. I ALWAYS operate 
in Fixed Tune Mode, so that display averaging continues to accumulate as 
I tune across the band. When you do all of these things, random band 
noise goes away (it averages out to zero) so you're left with signals 
and coherent noise (like switching power supplies).  Set the display 
width depending on what you're doing at the time. For example, to 
monitor a quiet band for activity, I typically set for 100 kHz or 200 
kHz. In a contest, I'll set it for the width of activity for that 
contest. For a DX pileup, I go about twice as wide as the pileup, with 
the DX at one end.

It can also be quite useful to assign commonly used settings to the 
soft-keys. I assign the Fixed Tune Toggle, the Peak/Average Toggle, and 
the display widths that I most often used. For the P3 that I use for 
spectrum measurements, I also assign the Capture to RAM command.

73, Jim K9YC