Should contest rules allow and act upon 599K QRM reports?

Saturday 7 June 2014

President Lincoln II V3 cw testing (part 2) 3 firmware bugs found...so far!

Well I'd like to share some more findings with you. Yet again the President Lincoln II V3 (cw mode) was nearly assigned to the bin. On listening to my transmission on another transceiver I noticed that the initial transmitted cw element was not only chopped, but the transmitted tone changed by about 200Hz like it was drifting or warming up. On air it sounded very poor for the initial cw element then fine for the rest of the transmission. Just by chance I moved the clarifier and discovered that the initial cw element tone drift characteristic changed on transmit! I had the clarifier at 2 o'clock to allow me to rx returning cw stations, I centered the clarifier and listened to my initial transmitted cw element....no more tone drift! Yet another firmware problem! I thought about this a bit and came up with a work around...SPLIT! I set up a postive split of 600Hz (6 offset on the LCD) this meant I could work stations with the clarifier centered and avoid the initial cw element transmit tone drift problem. Just to summarise all the cw problems found so far: 1) Initial transmitted cw element chopped due to "PTT too slow" to engage. 2) Initial transmitted cw element "long dah" independent of the key up/dwn position. 3) Initial transmitted cw element "tone drift" due to non-centered clarifier. With my work-arounds (in order): 1) Send an initial dit before the start of every transmission. 2) Increase the size of the initial transmitted cw element i.e. slow down cw speed. 3) Center the clarifier and use a 600Hz split instead (this fault means the clarifier cannot be used). The good news is that once you implement the above work-arounds the President Lincoln can be used quite effectively in cw mode. Hopefully President will see this post and implement some fixes for future firmware revisions...please? Tone drift video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh9z2Vh0JeY

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