I completely agree with Wayne. Having listened to our mostly CW bands at our QRP FD and looking at the early scores on 3830, comparing them to previous years, I notice almost no decline.
Last year, in one of the worst single propagation years I can remember in 30 years of FD (43 for W2GD who agrees), we came within a few hundred points of setting the 3A record. We were behind only the PVRC (23A) and Rochester (17A) in total score. This year we were within 500 or so points of setting the 2A battery QRP record. You cannot do this with a seriously falling density of CW ops because they count 2 points per Q (10 if you are QRP). Anecdotally and mathematically, I believe we can argue that Bill's analysis of what he has heard is incorrect. I love a good argument though, and will listen to any counter remarks with interest. Bob N4HY -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of wayne burdick Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 3:09 PM To: Bill Tippett Cc: Elecraft Reflector Subject: [Elecraft] Re: FD W4ZV 1B QRP Single Op Hi Bill, Congratulations on your excellent showing on Field Day. With that many QSOs, I'm sure you'll do very well in your division. Yes, FD is a bit of work, but it's also a great chance to get outdoors and try your hand at emergency communication setup. I think you'll be back next year ;) > ...seemed to me that the CW bands were surprisingly empty. ... Wow -- that wasn't my impression at all. I heard wall-to-wall CW signals on 20 and 40 meters most of the time, and a good number on 15 and 80 meters. Having done FD for some 10 years in a row now, I'd say that CW activity is about the same as ever. When using QRP on Field Day, you need a lot of patience and the best possible antenna. What I usually do is put up at least two antennas (typically, orthogonal long wires that favor N-S and E-W). You can connect both to the KAT2 or KAT100 at the same time, since both ATUs have dual antenna jacks. You can then quickly test both antennas, even on a per-signal basis, using the front panel ANT1/2 switch. > QSK... Where did you have T-R set in the menu? At T-R = 0.00, the receiver is unmuted very fast, which can cause a small receive artifact with certain narrow crystal filter and DSP settings. But we recommend using T-R = 0.01 or higher anyway. For casual operation, use T-R = 0.02 to 0.05. The time required to cleanly switch the VCO between RX and TX is around 10-15 ms. We put a high value on completely clickless and chirpless CW keying, and adjusted firmware delays accordingly. Still, wiith TR = 0.01, you should be able to hear between characters (not words) even at 50 WPM. If not, you may have an assembly or component problem somewhere. It's likely that we could improve VCO lock time and obtain between-dits receive at such speeds. This is one item on my list of possible future mods for the K2. > Power meter... It's a good idea to adjust POWER when not keying. During transmit, a small additional amount of hysteresis is added to the POWER control to improve noise margin, and this can increase the power-control step size. You can also usually adjust one resistor value in the BFO attenuator to improve power-setting accuracy. Some JFETs (Q24) have much higher transconductance than average, leading to coarser steps from the 8-bit DAC. To compensate, try increasing the value of R98 from 270 to as high as 470-820 ohms. (This experiment is best done with a small trim pot installed; replace the pot with a fixed resistor close to the final pot value.) If you adjust R98's value, make sure that the rig can still reach at least 10 watts on all bands with POWER set to 10.0. > CW messages... In order to store the maximum possible characters in the K2's CW message memories, the firmware "quantizes" your sending into standard-length dots, dashes, and spaces. This is not as forgiving as using a "times-8 clock" for recording, which is characteristic of some keyers. But such keyers have a much larger EEPROM than the K2 does, or they don't provide as many characters of storage. It's conceivable that we could go to a larger part in the future and use a times-8 or even times-16 sample clock. (Another item on my future mods list....) 73, Wayne, N6KR _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
