The cheapest Kenwoods I've seen with twin band pass tuning in the IF stage are the TS-930 and TS-850. The TS-570 variable band pass is a DSP AF filter.

If you are willing to learn CW, you can work 15, 40, and 80 meters even with your Tech license.  And, also if you are in the "hands-on" camp like a few others here, CW only transceivers are cheaper and easier to build. There are plenty of kits to choose from.

The Yahoo forum is filtered and posts are regularly deleted. If you go there you'll notice that there aren't any posts before Nov 2012 even though there has been a forum since at least 2009 when I was posting there. Why is that? What is there to hide? FWIW, I was posting there back in 2009 because I couldn't get my Chameleon V1 to work and had a series of posts with other owners and one of the Chameleon employees trying to figure out what was wrong. My threads were deleted a few months after posting. My suspicion was that posts that didn't help with sales were purged.

Also, you can make a similar performing antenna for less than half the price with a Balun Designs 9:1 Unun and 53' of wire. Balun Designs has a cutting chart and 53' will keep the SWR low enough on 160-6m for a typical internal or external compact tuner to handle. The rating is only 300 watts but when you are talking encom, how many cart around an amp? And of course if you buy your own toroid you can wind your own for even less; the design is well documented.

Ray KJ6AMF

Take a look at this thread, 4th post down. Apparently there is an undocumented menu setting where you can disable Tx of any mode.

http://www.eham.net/ehamforum/smf/index.php?topic=68193.0

Also, if you set CW for no break-in, you need to short pins 2 & 3 on the ACC jack.

I've used this method successfully more than once to get a DX station when there is a bit of a pileup. If you call the DX you want when he's listening, and he's running JT65-HF, when his software decodes your transmission it will highlight it as red and all he has to do is double click your call to answer.

If the DX just showed up and you have several people calling him on the same frequency he's transmitting, find a quiet spot and call there. Since he's working the waterfall with software that looks for his callsign, you don't have to be on frequency to get his attention.

I assume you are talking about the BHI DSP filter that mounts inside the FT-817.

The add on DSP filter works in both modes. If you look for the BHI DSP at www.w4rt.com there are sample mp3 files that lets you hear the improvement on both SSB and CW. However, this DSP is tailored for SSB. If you want better CW filtering, a narrow bandpass filter, something like a SCAF, might work better.

I'm looking at the installation manual and the DSP is installed after the audio amp but before the volume control so you should hear filter audio in your headphones.

If you are going to work more CW and digital, I think a plug-in Collins filter would be more effective.

Take this with a grain of salt as I too am just learning but hear is some off-the-air advice I've gotten from my club elmers...

Try copying behind. That is instead of writing the characters as you hear them, try listening, storing the characters in your head, and transcribe them a few characters back. For example, if you are doing 5 character code groups like ABCUW, don't write the "A" as you hear it but let a few characters come first so that maybe you are hearing the "U" when you start writing "AB..". What you are doing is training your brain to not just translate but to actually store characters as a word is being formed.

See if your software has a word or qso mode. The software I use has a library of CW abbreviations, q-codes, and common English words. If your software has it, try transcribing words after you hear them. Many will recommend not writing anything down but if you do that you don't have anyway of checking your progress and seeing where you need work. As you progress, try to listen for more than one word before you type anything.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet but if you invest in a 2m/70cm HT, you can work FM satellites. Head over to the satellite forum if this sound interesting to you.

Another thing you can try is to go to the nearest grade crossing (a place where the road crosses the tracks). Look for the gate control box. On them there should be a large sign indicating who maintains the line, a DOT number or mile post indicating a location, and an 800 number to report problems. A report from you should get the right Maintenance of Way team looking into it.

Here is a copy you can print out:

http://www.n4mw.com/cp044.pdf

If that is your worry, why not avoid eBay and use the classfied section here and the other two ham websites? Then you'll know who is trying to buy your stuff before you've committed to the sale. You also won't have to pay the listing fee 

I'm using KMT Pro on my Android Tablet (OS Android 2.2) and highly recommend it. It's a Koch trainer, costs $2.49 and for me it's well worth the cost. I like how you can set the character and word speed in wpm. I'm almost done with the Koch series at 20wpm characters with Farnsworth spacing to take it down to 10wpm.

I've also used Morse Trainer by Wolphi LLC. It's also good and I found the sidetone especially nice. A downside to this program is that while you can set the character speed in wpm, Farnsworth spacing  is set in dots, as in how many dots you want between characters and between word groups. This makes it hard to interpret your effective rate and even harder to quickly adjust it if you want slightly take up or slow down your practice rate. Is stopped using this program as it keeps crashing on my Android 2.2 tablet after an update this past fall. However, it still works on my Android 2.3 phone.

Lastly, for sending practice I use Morse Code Reader by Jacek Fedorynski. I put my phone next to the rig and tap away on my straight key. The reader will tell me what it thinks I'm sending. It also shows the waveform so you can see if you dits are too long or the spacing in a character is uneven. It can only interpret code sent at about 10wpm or faster. Any slower and it thinks everything is an "E" or "T".

Ray KJ6AMF

Former U-verse customer here. I had to get rid of it because the DVR would lock up whenever I transmitted on 20m, even as low as 5 watts. We had a DVR with 3 additional set top boxes all connected with RG-6 coax. I tried everything I could think of wrt to grounding of the U-verse equipment and the ham gear to no avail. I had AT&T techs twice come out and they even dropped new RG-6.

The only thing left to try was to hook everything up with Cat-6 ethernet instead but AT&T wasn't going to fish the cable through the walls for free, I didn't want to pay someone to do it, and the XYL didn't wan't a bunch of cables running around exposed inside or out.  This was before AT&T introduced wireless set top boxes so they weren't an option. After talking over with the XYL, looking at what she watched, how much we spent each month, how much Comcast cable would cost as an alternative, we decided to drop U-verse TV and switched to OTA TV and Netflix streaming. We kept U-verse DSL which was never a problem and allows us to stream Netflix HD movies.

Ray KJ6AMF

Kyle,

Before you go out and get another rig because of the noise, it it probably worth while to figure out if the noise is actually from the rig, your antenna system, a neighbor's new electronic toy, something from the utility company, etc. If it's not the rig and you buy a new one, you may find you have wasted $1500 for the same poor Rx.

IC-735 are known to be pretty durable so I wouldn't suspect it first. But an easy test is just to disconnect it from the antenna and put it on a dummy load. If the noise goes from S5 down to faint hiss, it's not the rig. If the rig is ok, start adding components one by one. Perhaps in rewiring things, you've introduced a big ground loop. If everything still looks ok, try powering off a battery and shutting of the breakers to see if the source is in your home. If the noise is still there start snooping around with a portable radio. Perhaps one of your neighbors have bought something like a cordless drill with a charger that produces load, broadband hash.

If you are using the same printer and same card stock for all, the card checker is going to know. If you are going to try to beat the system by using a variety of printing sources, card stocks, graphic designs, etc. to make them all unique and realistic.... well you just plunked down a huge chunk of your time and money that probably would be better spent on actual equipment and operating time.

That is, the barrier to successfully cheating with paper qsl's is pretty high.

Cheating eQSL, however, isn't hard if you know anything about computer scripting. In fact, even without trying to cheat the system I get QSL's (that I don't confirm) from DX stations I've never worked.