Am mostly a CW man, studying possibility of buying the SDR1K. There are so many outstanding features in this rig. Am seeking more information on CW behavior of the SDR1K and solution paths. Would like comments on any one or all of the following points:
1) Out of the box, with no workarounds, would like a report of just how the SDR1K currently behaves on CW (I read the old description in the Oct 2005 QST article). Could you compare it to classic QSK rigs such as TT Omni VI+, or K2, and tell me what I would actually hear at 22 to 30 WPM? Is the side tone delayed? Do dits and dahs get cut off at the beginning? At this reflector on March 23 Lee Crocker, W9OY, said that he encounters "variable delays up to several hundred milliseconds" between the last key press and when the SDR1K goes back into the receive mode. Just how does this affect the CW man's enjoyment of the SDR1K for regular CW work? 2) Now, with a clear description of the problem in mind, tell me what workarounds CW fellows have used to mitigate the SDR1K CW problems? How successful are these workarounds, and what extra hardware should I plan on purchasing? In your view, is the SDR1K satisfactory to the CW man with these changes? 3) Can you trounce this beast with pure firepower? For example, Tim Ellison's monster, a dual Athlon core 64 bit 4400+ with plenty of L1 and L2 cache, or the Dual Core Intel Pentium D 840 3.4 GHz in top of the line Asus mobos, with plenty of hi speed ram? (Is one CPU preferred over the other?). 4) Are there "CW speed sensitive" sections of code that could be re-written in assembler and called from the main C sharp program? At about what point in the future does the SDR1K team expect CW problems to be resolved? 5) If the biggest part of the problem is "variable delays of several hundred milliseconds" (since Windows XP was not designed for real time aps), does the stripped down version of XP (http://www.litepc.com/), Windows 2000 Pro or Windows Server 20003 solve this problem?
