[Skimmertalk] Waterfall Sensitivity

Pete Smith n4zr at contesting.com
Wed Feb 17 14:30:08 PST 2010


I have to wonder what the noise floor of the sound card in the LP-Pan 
is.  Perhaps I'm technically out of my depth, but wouldn't that probably 
be the limiting factor?  I'm running Skimmer with a QS1R, fed by a 
separate antenna, and so far it seems to be able to hear anything I can 
on my Mark 5.

73, Pete N4ZR
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On 2/17/2010 12:42 PM, Dave - AB7E wrote:
> Same here.  I've played a LOT with the trace controls on CW Skimmer and it still doesn't display weak but perfectly readable signals.  I'm feeding the Line Out audio from my K3 into a good quality, low noise sound card (M-Audio 2496), so I don't think it is any kind of software issue.
>
> By the way, I've been using the waterfall from CW Skimmer as a running 12 second visual display of in-band (300 Hz or so) CW signals during contests to visually pick up characters that I missed the first time by ear.  It's a bit clumsy, but it comes in handy enough to make it worthwhile having.  I wrote a simple AutoHotKey macro to pause the CW Skimmer waterfall from the keyboard so I don't have to move my hand to the mouse.
>
> 73,
> Dave   AB7E
>
>
> ------Original Mail------
> From: "Barry N1EU"<barry.n1eu at gmail.com>
> To:<skimmertalk at contesting.com>
> Sent: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:17:24 +0000
> Subject: Re: [Skimmertalk] Waterfall Sensitivity
>
> On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Bill Tippett<btippett at alum.mit.edu>  wrote:
>    
>> Even though I could copy his signal Q5 by ear, Skimmer was
>> detecting absolutely nothing of his signal...not even a faint trace.
>> I'm beginning to feel this is a limitation of Skimmer's software
>> rather than hardware and am wondering if anyone else has observed this
>> on extremely weak signals.
>>      
> I often observe the same thing. I've had no success trying to adjust
> the trace controls to bring up the waterfall sensitivity.
>
> 73,
> barry N1EU
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