I missed some of this discussion, so I may be off track
here. But I think I know what Vic means. Some message
memories record in real time--you leave a long space, and it
shows up in your memory the same way. But the K3 seems to
be tied to a rather precise gap between letters or words.
Actually, this kind of method will help point out flaws in
the way a person sends. Some time back I was trying to
record a "CQ" message in a keyer memory, and I discovered I
had developed a tendency to leave a bit too much space
between my next-to-last call letter and the last letter. I
was sending "W7AQK" as "W7AQ K". I probably did it for
years! It was also possibly one of the reasons so many
people came back to me as "W7AQ", thinking I had sent the
"K" as an "invitation to transmit". In contests, etc.,
they weren't even waiting for the second "K" at the end.
Now that I've been paying more intention (and it hasn't been
easy getting out of that habit), I don't seem to get as many
incorrect responses.
The message buffers in the K3 are pretty large, so they make
a pretty good recording device for recording yourself and
checking on your sending technique. I know this method is
kind of a pain in the butt for a lot of us, but I really
like it if my messages come out like machine code. I'm not
sure other methods would do this as effectively.
Another thing I've been playing with a bit is sending CW and
letting the K3 convert it to RTTY. If you don't move right
along, with proper spacing, you get a bunch of extra garbage
between characters. Being able to send RTTY without a
computer is sort of a "gee whiz" feature, but it's been fun
playing with it.
Dave W7AQK
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vic K2VCO" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Tom Hammond" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 11, 2008 3:12 PM
Subject: [Elecraft] Re: CW-to-RTTY with message buffers: are
spaces there?
Tom Hammond wrote:
One way to handle this would be to use "1/4 letter
space" as the basic spacing element. Then recording,
decoding, and playback would be closer to real-time.
Can you 'splain this a bit better Vic? Never heard of
this method of timing... always worked on the baud
method.
First I have to reverse-engineer Wayne's code!
The firmware now listens to the spaces between characters
as you send. If the space is less than some fixed
threshold it assumes that it is a letter space; if more, a
word space.
When it records what you have sent, it puts in a token
that indicates either a word space or a letter space is
needed. During playback, when it comes to a letter-space
token it waits for the appropriate time (whatever that
is); when it comes to a word-space token it waits longer.
This means that while you are recording, if you wait a
little bit past the threshold that it uses to decide what
size space it is, it will put in a word space token. So
when I send my call K 2VCO, I get K 2VCO.
My suggestion is that instead of just two possibilities
for spacing, there should be more. This could be
implemented by creating tokens for smaller spaces, like
1/4 of a letter space. That would sound almost like a
real-time recording, in terms of preserving the spacing as
sent. But even using units of half of a letter space would
avoid the difficulty that those of us who do not send like
tape machines have when recording messages!
--
73,
Vic, K2VCO
Fresno CA
http://www.qsl.net/k2vco
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