No argument Scott. What I meant was that one doesn't have to match the tones by ear to "zero beat" although when one does zero beat they end up being the same frequency.
Don brought up that issue that you mention that many suffer - not being able to tell whether to raise or lower the frequency of a tone to bring them close enough to hear the pulsation near zero beat. (He mentioned he has broken a few guitar strings over the years trying to figure out which way to go when tuning one.) That's not been an issue for me, so even if I'm hearing the beat at several hundred Hz or more I can still quickly tune down to zero. But it's going to be very frustrating if one can't tell which way to tune, making it impossible to zero beat efficiently. CWT is a valuable addition to the K3. I confess I often use it rather than zero beat manually. It always gets me within 10 or 20 Hz. (Reverse CWT? Doo-dee-doo-dee...Do not attempt to adjust your rig. For this QSO it is under our control...") 73, Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- I must disagree with Ron about the "matching tones". When you "zero beat" the transceiver with a received signals using the sidetone or spot tone, matching the frequencies of those two audio tones is exactly what you are doing. With a tracking sidetone, as in most modern transceivers, those two frequencies are the same when the transmitter is on exactly the same frequency as the received signal. The PROCESS the operator uses to get those two frequencies to be the same can ultimately be to listen for the slow beat between them and to make the beat frequency got to nearly zero. That only works, however, after they are very close, and you have to somehow get them that close. You don't have to have perfect musical pitch to determine whether one is higher or lower in pitch than the other, and that's how most of us get close. Indeed, for even the most demanding CW operating, you don't have to be EXACTLY on the other station's frequency: within 10-20 Hz is just about always close enough.... Scott K9MA ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
