The problem is less for me than for the people I work in pileups: I miss the
first letter and the people only send once. I send a partial call sign. They
send their call again once (with the first letter weak or non-existent). It
takes several go arounds to get their call right. So I wondered if amps didn't
pick up instantaneously, or picked up at lower power for the first letter or
two before reaching full power. If the call is repeated a few times, the
problem, of course, disappears. But a lot of people just send once each time.
On Monday, March 11, 2024 at 06:35:33 PM GMT, Jim Brown
<jim@audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:
On 3/11/2024 10:19 AM, David Gow wrote:
> Most modern transceivers have a menu setting that will delay the first
> letter transmission for a milliseconds after the amp has been switched to
> transmit. If the amplifiers have mechanical relays this is needed both to
> avoid cutting off letters and to avoid hot switching.switching.
Neighbor K6XX, an engineer at Elecraft, had a long history with tube
amps before working on their power amps as a manufacturing engineer.
From him, I learned that for amps with a good vacuum relay, an 8 msec
setting for that delay was enough.
The owner of Ten Tec was a serious CW op; their amps were designed for
full QSK. I owned three of their first big amp, the Titan 425, and ran
it that way. The only downside was that you could go through relays in
CW contesting. All of those three amps were bought used, and I changed
out the relays of two of them when they failed in the middle of a
contest. That caused me to abandon QSK until I could afford to buy used
87As a decade later. Their diode R/T switching allows full QSK. So do
the Elecraft KPA500 and KPA1500.
73, Jim K9YC
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