In article , Geoffrey S.
Mendelson wrote:

Mark Conrad mused...
If one rig stands out head and shoulders above others for CW work,
then I would be strongly tempted to favor that rig.

If you like full QSK, the older Ten-Tec

Good Grief, do they still sell the Ten-Tec, I used to own one
in the old days, a nice little full break-in rig.


Being able to extract that one weak signal in a pile-up is a
different matter, but many people don't care to. I would
not want to spend an entire afternoon listening to a
250Hz filter, no matter what it was made of (crystal,
mechaincal, digital, etc). Someone else might.

What! - watch it, that would be heaven for me ;-)

Of course I would demand a few modern touches, such as
automatically generating morse code by first speaking
into a microphone and converting my voice to text,
(very easy to do, BTW, using modern
speech recognition software, like "MacSpeech"
for the Mac, or "Dragon NaturallySpeaking"
on a Windows computer)
- then feeding that text into a device that would change
the text into morse code and store it temporarily in
a computer buffer - - - to be dumped into the xmtr
at a touch of a button for morse-code transmission
to the distant station.

I fantasize about finding a device that will change
morse code into text, because modern computers
can easily change text to an artificial voice,
which nowadays sounds exactly like a real person.

Perhaps the very high speed "burst" guys (RTTY?)
know of such a device.

As regards listening to the high-pitched hiss of a
narrow CW filter, seems to me in the old days that I
kinda got around that by first using a somewhat wider
filter, like 500Hz, then shutting off my receivers
BFO entirely. (is shutting off the BFO still possible
on modern CW rigs?)

Then I would fire up a small independent BFO I kept
on the table next to my rig, to generate the necessary
audio signal for my ears.

The independent BFO was extremely weak by design,
so that any strong CW signal next to the weak one
was reduced to the same weak audio.

Mark