[Elecraft] K3/K3S Noise Blanker Performance Greatly Enhanced...

[Tony Marr]

Greetings fellow Elecrafters,

 

Being very interested in Wayne's initial comments regarding his experiments,
and because I share his noise problems here; I've had an initial play. A
brief summary of my initial results are as follows:

 

I was copying  VP8SGI on 10110KHZ around about 1000UTC- they had a very
fluttery polar signal on a rather "hissy" band with the usual bursts of QRN
as well. (Both VP8STI & VP8SGI are very difficult for us ZLs, as it's a bad
polar path...)

 

I'd faked my 6KHz filter to operate at 300Hz width, and  it did help quite a
bit with the NB activated, to clean the signal up. For me, the sweet point
seems to be t2-6, and the readability of the signal was much improved over
using my 400Hz filter at 400Hz width, with or without noise blanking or
noise reduction.

 

I also listened to some poor signals on 40 metres in the VP8's pile up
there, and found exactly the same results. In fact, some signals were
improved from being audible but barely readable to being quite good copy,
and again, t2-6 seemed to be best.

 

On 80 metres this morning, digging out the Europeans at the bottom of the
band, t3-2 seemed best.

 

I'll continue to play,  it's certainly worth investigating further, even if
it does mean tweaking the NB setting from time to time. I don't mind
tweaking a knob or two if it lets me notch up a new one.

 

73,

 

Tony, ZL2AGY.