In article , Geoffrey S.
Mendelson wrote:
Mark Conrad wrote:
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.
Ten-Tec is alive and well, still selling ham rigs. Their current
top of the line the Orion II is as good as or better than the K3,
depending upon whom you ask. I've never used either,
so I am not one to ask. :-)
Okay, then that is yet another rig for me to check out.
How long has it been since you've been on the air? It may not
be as wonderful as your memories.
I am guessing at 55 years, and as you state memory is a very
fickle thing, often wrong. I had two licenses, both extra class
over a period of years, after I let one of those licenses lapse.
I am not certain of the call sign, I think it was W6IXC, but the
other I am _certain_ was W6TAM because one of my friends
suggested that meant "Terrified Ancient Mariner" after my
sailboat exploits offshore the California coast in various small
sailboats ranging in size between an 8 foot "sabot" to a 27 foot
"Ericson" sailboat.
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.
Sure but why? Why not just use SSB.
No rational reason, there is no accounting for why some
people prefer to do things the hard way. ;-)
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.
My guess is that there are a lot of people out there using
such devices (keyboards to morse and morse to ascii)
than you would think.
It's easy to tell, the spacing and timing is too perfect.
Hmm, I suspect I did not get across my exact meaning,
my fault, sorry about that.
I _meant_ a device that will change the _incoming_
morse code dots and dashes to an artificial voice.
In other words, change this code at 60 wpm:
_ _ . . . . . . _ _ _ _ _ _ _
....into this artificial voice from an audio speaker:
"Best Wishes, Old Man"
....such that a ham newbie who did not even know the
morse code would be able to listen to a CW signal
rattling along at 60 wpm and have that signal
converted to speech that he could understand.
In theory it is possible, given a loud clean
CW signal.
I would hate to be the guy to design such a device,
it would not be a trivial project.
What is a BFO? Seriously, the high end rigs don't use
them. They detect CW using the product detector (SSB)
or some similar method.
Well that shows how behind the times I am. Heck, I still
think in terms of vacuum tubes (Fleming valves?)
The below website considers the ancient BFO technology,
explains it in words even a senile old ham like me
can understand:
http://www.tpub.com/neets/book12/51.htm
Consider using a very weak RF Beat Frequency Oscillator
(BFO) to discriminate between four very close CW
signals, such as:
7,250,500 Hz (desired signal)
7,250,520 Hz (interfering signal #1)
7,249,500 Hz (interfering signal #2)
7,249,520 Hz (interfering signal #3)
A very weak, very stable, tunable BFO can create a local
RF signal at a frequency of say 7,250,000 Hz
Two resulting audio "beat frequecies" result, assuming
a ham can "turn off" the regular BFO or "product detector"
that usually creates the audio coming out of the speaker:
1) 500 Hz
2) 520 Hz
Heh, I am in deep doo-doo, so I shift my local RF BFO
to a slightly different frequency of 7,251,000 Hz
Four resulting audio "beat frequencies" result:
1) 500 Hz (desired signal)
2) 480 Hz (interfering signal #1)
3) 1500 Hz (interfering signal #2)
4) 1480 Hz (interfering signal #3)
An audio filter should be able to separate the
desired 500 Hz audio from the 480 Hz audio,
I hope.
Anyone have any experience with those audio
filters for a CW signal? I never used one,
do they really work?
BTW, there is no law that limits the amount of
radios you own, and since you are in the US,
you don't have to register them when you buy them
and notify the authorities that you sold them.
You don't even need a license to buy them...
Good Grief, are those restrictions common in a lot
of countries?
USA will likely become that way also, if our present
political ding-ding gets his way to turn this country
into a socialist paradise, with Big Brother taking care
of all our problems from cradle to grave. [sic]
I am so old I can remember when the people ran the USA,
now the politicians are busy taking away a lot of our
freedoms, one by one, and they have no intention of
ever returning control to the people.
Mark