K CW-to-data wierdness

[lstavenhagen]

Hi all,

I finally found something goofy in my K3 that may or not be a bug (questions below). CW-to-data can go into a confused state with imperfect keying. I noticed this yesterday during a PSK QSO using my paddles for transmit. Towards the end of a QSO, when I was sending rather poorly, hi hi, the rig suddenly exitted transmit and the sidetone became a continuous tone. I tapped the dit paddle and all was restored and I continued on.

Later I tried it into my dummy load to troubleshoot if it was just RF getting into the rig. I did find eventually that I was able to reproduce the behavior pretty consistently by sending a random series of dits/dahs into it without a break. I.e. in iambic mode, hold both paddles together (send aaaaa...), then release the dit paddle (tttttt), release the dah paddle (eeeeeee)... pretty soon the rig gets confused - the behaviors I've seen are exiting transmit with a continuous sidetone, exiting transmit with a continuous set of dits going on with no sidetone.

Hitting the paddle always seems to bring it back.

One possibility is that I'm inadvertently sending a known command to the encoder in the mess of dits and dahs and it's trying to do the right thing in the middle of it all.

So my questions would be:
- are there 'hidden' commands to the encoder available in CW (i.e. like 'IM' to immediately switch to RX) and if so what would they be?
- if I'm not just confusing it due to my own incompetence, is this an actual known problem?

This mode does seem to work fine as long as your keying is spot on, so it's not a huge concern. But it is a little strange to me to be able to confuse it like this...

Tnx es 73,
LS
W5QD

[Don Wilhelm-4]

LS,

I think you have discovered a bug that had not been seen before.  I took
the liberty of forwarding it to Wayne and Lyle.

73,
Don W3FPR

lstavenhagen wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I finally found something goofy in my K3 that may or not be a bug (questions
> below). CW-to-data can go into a confused state with imperfect keying. I
> noticed this yesterday during a PSK QSO using my paddles for transmit.
> Towards the end of a QSO, when I was sending rather poorly, hi hi, the rig
> suddenly exitted transmit and the sidetone became a continuous tone. I
> tapped the dit paddle and all was restored and I continued on.
>
> Later I tried it into my dummy load to troubleshoot if it was just RF
> getting into the rig. I did find eventually that I was able to reproduce the
> behavior pretty consistently by sending a random series of dits/dahs into it
> without a break. I.e. in iambic mode, hold both paddles together (send
> aaaaa...), then release the dit paddle (tttttt), release the dah paddle
> (eeeeeee)... pretty soon the rig gets confused - the behaviors I've seen are
> exiting transmit with a continuous sidetone, exiting transmit with a
> continuous set of dits going on with no sidetone.
>
> Hitting the paddle always seems to bring it back.
>
> One possibility is that I'm inadvertently sending a known command to the
> encoder in the mess of dits and dahs and it's trying to do the right thing
> in the middle of it all.
>
> So my questions would be:
> - are there 'hidden' commands to the encoder available in CW (i.e. like 'IM'
> to immediately switch to RX) and if so what would they be?
> - if I'm not just confusing it due to my own incompetence, is this an actual
> known problem?
>
> This mode does seem to work fine as long as your keying is spot on, so it's
> not a huge concern. But it is a little strange to me to be able to confuse
> it like this...
>
> Tnx es 73,
> LS
> W5QD
>  

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[lstavenhagen]

Ok, tnx Don. I wasn't sure if I should try to report this "formally" unless I had a reproduceable scenario (that's the QA guy in me), but I've just confirmed that this will do it every time (at least on my rig). It's also independent of which mode you use - happens in both FSK-D and PSK-D - or keying speed. Also it happens in Test mode (i.e. don' t need to be actually transmitting to replicate it).

The strange behavior seems to have some definite symptoms as well - the rig exits transmit and quits sending the encoded signal and the keyer is a mystified state (locked in a continuous tone, or producing keying with no sidetone).
Hitting the paddle always restores normal behavior.

Whew, what a relief. I thought I was getting too hot during the QSO and had done some kind of damage, hi hi. Even with the power level set at 5 watts, the underneath of the rig gets pretty hot during PSK (as I'd imagine the peak power output is still considerably more than that) hi hi.
If it's a SW bug that means it's probably easily fixable....

Tns es 73,
LS
W5QD