CW contest hates

1) "my callsign" being sent by a caller...I know my callsign! 2) Unnecessary "tu" reply after my "tu" which covers the next caller....thanks for slowing my rate, agn agn?! 3) "579" rx report rather than just "599" ,does it really matter?...arg tab? space? QRX QRX! 4) "/QRP" ...never do them the favour of repeating back this stupidity...not in log more like! 4) "CFM"...thanks for this needless remark and for slowing my rate! Please note DL especially. 5) "?" covering over callers...you impatient f%^k...just wait till I repeat my call every 20-30secs! 6) "ur call?"...why did you call me if you don't know my call? Just wait till my next cq call you muppet! 7) "pse QRS"...no, you called me, you have all the time in the world to work my callsign out. Did you recognise any of these? An additional note: The reason I am going >30wpm is to role off the pile-up...in short I want to lose your Q...don't call me mid pile-up under 20wpm in this situation, just tune on... I'll get you S&P later at your speed.

Flex 6300 PTT bug now fixed!

Hurray! After 4 years and multiple posts/complaints from cw operators all over the world, Flexradio has finally realised that PTT doesn't work in CW mode. A fix came in v2 of SSDR software and now we can use Flexradio in CW mode (non QSK) for the first time! Flexradio seemed too wrapped up in dealing with QSK ragchew operators and only recently (when looking at contesters needs) finally realised that the customer knew best all along. The fix wasn't well advertised and I was most surprised to find it worked when I tested v2. Now when you unkey you don't have to wait for a QSK delay thus missing the prefix of any return callers. This was the last big bug I have in the basic functionality of SSDR. Now hopefully we can get a noise blanker or some noise reduction functions that work for everyone.

President Lincoln II+ Review

After all the bugs I found on the President Lincoln II for cw operation (see this blog), I was eager to try the II+ to see if President had bothered correcting any of them. Nevada had a flash sale and I decided to pick one up. I shall get straight to the point here.... 0 cw changes...I repeat 0 cw changes. What a massive disappointment. Long DAH problem when initial sent cw element is meant to be a DIT - still there Need to use RIT or split to equalise TX/RX frequencies to make any cw contacts - still the case Initial sent cw DAH frequency change due to RIT being off centre - still there Still the crap double sideband receiver mess - still the case And a new one....when you press and hold the up or down scan button on the microphone, you only hear the frequency you started the scan on. The only way to hear each frequency is to continuously tap either button leaving enough time for the audio to recover between each press. The radio sounds awful, I'm never finished fiddling with the RIT, something in the receiver chain blows big time...voices sound weak and dual tone like a dalek (I'm being kind here). I really cannot express my disappointment in this radio enough. It's not even that I bought an early version (both v3) or a Friday pup, I have two of them and both sound crap. I cannot believe anyone out there who owns an original Lincoln could like this radio. RF engineers at President should hang their heads in shame. Your peers really have showed you a clean pair of heels, the young apprentice has tried to take SMT short cuts and been distracted by DSP trickery and the result is a radio only the newbies could want to like (due to the cost). Any company who has been given free testing resource, free feedback and ignores it all and adds insult to injury by producing an update and calling it "+" as if it is an improvement, then just knocking out the same old crap deserves to go bust. I really do not like President Lincoln II (v3) or President Lincoln II+. I am embarrassed to have recently contributed to their coffers..twice!