[Elecraft] Auto-spot, tuning aids, and the arcane history of CW pitch-matching

[K9MA]

Back in my college days at W9YT, we had a Drake line, separate 
transmitter and receivers. When searching and pouncing in a contest, you 
had to spot the transmitter before every contact. Spotting required 
turning one of the rotary switches on the transmitter, a cumbersome 
process. Imagine doing that a couple thousand times in a weekend. At 
some point, we came up with the idea to hook a foot switch up to do the 
spotting, which made it much easier, and save a lot of wear and tear on 
the rotary switch, not to mention the operator's wrist.

In those days, 40-50 years ago, transceivers just didn't work well on 
CW, so almost all CW operators used separate transmitters and receivers. 
Some, like the Drake line, could transceive, but had the same problem on 
CW. Transceivers didn't account for the BFO offset, and there was no RIT 
or XIT. If you called another station in transceive mode, you would be 
700 Hz or so off frequency. Two transceivers pretty much couldn't work 
each other at all. Sometime while I was inactive in the late 70's and 
80's, that problem was solved, and we no longer had to spot before every 
contact. I think that solution had to wait for frequency synthesis, as 
it otherwise would have required additional (expensive) crystals. Does 
anyone know of a non-synthesized transceiver that didn't have the CW 
offset problem?

73,
Scott K9MA


On 1/21/2019 23:09, Wayne Burdick wrote:
> Elecraft's auto-spot and CWT features -- available on the K3/K3S/KX2/KX3 -- are very useful tools for CW operators, especially those not experienced in pitch-matching. Here's a bit of history on where these features came from and how they work.


-- 
Scott  K9MA

k9ma at sdellington.us