Re: Me and my K3 in the ARRL RTTY Roundup

Posted by Mike Harris on Jan 10, 2011; 12:29pm
URL: http://elecraft.85.s1.nabble.com/Me-and-my-K3-in-the-ARRL-RTTY-Roundup-tp5905749p5906736.html

G'day,

Don't forget that big signals attract many callers.  It is very
difficult to pull RTTY sigs out of the pile if they are all on top
of each other and calling at the same time.  Once the pile builds I
regularly have to go split to make any progress with a whole one or
two kHz worth of waterfall looking like Niagara Falls.

On the subject of interface boxes.  I've used both, direct audio
into the PC and more recently via a Digi Keyer II.  The audio card
in the PC isn't as good as that in the DK.  I don't have a problem
getting TX audio level to five bars on the ALC.  My new PC will not
have an RS-232 port so the all in one functionality of the DK suits
me fine.  There have been regular reports in the past of PC noise on
the RS-232 interconnect and I had the same until I home brewed a
cable from CAT6 material as per Jim K9YC.  I also noted that using a
simple USB<>RS-232 interface also injected noise.  This was not
present when using the mH CW Keyer as a CAT interface for either my
K2 or K3.  Neither do I get injected noise using the DK.

You pays yer money you takes yer choice.

Regards,

Mike VP8NO

<snip>

> Now, the main observation.  There were an awful lot of "Alligator"
> stations out there that don't have very good receivers.  If I
> could decode the signals, I called them.  Many of the weaker
> signals came right back to me, but an awful lot of the S9+
> stations couldn't seem to hear anything (not just me, but a lot of
> stations).  Sure makes the K3 look better and better and BOY what
> a super tuning aid the P3 turned out to be.  I wound up relying on
> it to find those weaker stations between the "big guns" and worked
> 90 percent of them.  The power company is working on a serious
> line noise problem around here, and they haven't gotten it all
> located yet though and I had to put up with a lot of insulator arc
> noise as it was very windy all weekend.  I'll be glad when they
> get it all fixed (they promised me they wouldn't quit till the
> noise was gone after some prompting from the FCC).

<snip>

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