My 3-500's have lasted 25 years, and still make rated peak power.  If they last an order of magnitude longer, my great great grandchildren will all be dead.

I use a N3ZN single lever SLR.  Heavy key great feel

73

I have an MFJ 998 and use it up to 1500W and it works fine for general use like loading up an 80M dipole on 30M, or a 20M dipole on 17.  I wouldn't try to use it to load a 80M or 40M antenna on 160 for example at 1500W but I might try using it at 100W for that task  

For a first paddle I would look for a usedv single lever vibroplex

N3ZN single lever  best paddle around

Is the exciter keying up on 160?  Is there some menu that allows the relay in the exciter to be turned off or on for each  band?

http://w9oy-sdr.blogspot.com/2009/09/43ft-vert.html

It doesn't make any difference where the wire is in comparison to the tree.  I use high pressure red rubber tubing (from ACE hardware) as insulators and strain relief for antennas I put up in pine trees.  There is a LOT of swaying and a foot or two of rubber tubing along the path of strain takes I think definitely helps keep the wire from self destructing.  My 135ft flattop has been up in my pines for 18 years and has survived half a dozen hurricanes.  Where the wire makes a bend like in an inv L I run the wire into the tubing, out a transverse hole I drill in the tubing and wrap that in a clove hitch then a small loop of wire into another clove hitch through another transverse hole and out the center hole.  I then tie off the rubber tubing this completely eliminates the strain a bend would put on the wire. 

What I did was to have a a tree climber climb the tree and put a eyebolt into the tree I put a separate ring through the eyebolt as eventually the eyebolt will disappear into the tree,  I ran some steel cable up the tree with and use that to hoist things up and down.  Trees generally have a natural bow so I have the wire coming down in a way that the tree bows away from the wire, though I would not worry about even winding the wire around the tree if you need that kind of stealth.   If you have branches in the way of the wire's descent have the tree climber prune the branches.  The climber cost me $75 and he came fully equipped and insured.  Over 20 years it cost me about 3 bux a year to have full access to my natural towers   

For your installation just put up the wire add about 20 radials and have a blast.  For my vertical wires I use #12 stranded with insulation.

73  W9OY

I learned to head copy by going CW mobile and started making contacts.  It was trial by fire.  You either got the hang of it or no one would talk to you. 

73  W9OY

I agree skimmer got the tuning right on cw  there is no reason this could not be included in psdr but I won't hold my breath

I did think about you bill when we were doing the control in so2r  I added a second input for a second foot switch so you can control the run tr with one foot and the snp tr with the other  kinda like playing an organ

73

Since you haven't really entered into developing an alternative user interface design, you have no real idea of how much more efficient you could make your contest operation.  You merely happen to occasionally be marginally better at doing what everybody else does in a given contest.

When Fosbury brought the flop to the world of high jumping he revolutionized the sport.  When fuel injection was introduced the carburetor died.  It took a while, but the advantage became clear.  You revolutionize nothing.  Not to take away from your accomplishments of course.  Its just the same old application of the same old crap.   

As we were developing SO2R aspect of the radio last year, we ran into a lot of resistance from the contest community and contest software providers in regard to supporting the Flex system.  We had to do some pretty ugly hacking on the command stream in the contest software to get it to work, but we did get it to work.  Done correctly without hacking it would work better.  Eventually a smart contester who knows his way around a C+ compiler will develop an efficient front end and will fully integrate this system into a credible contest station.  He will then begin to hone the productivity because it is very easy to do that in software and the equivalent of the flop will be born.  In the mean time the dino's will be rooting on and on about how: "that ain't contesting" 

Personally I think it's quite humerus you are still pontificating about KNOBS as if that matters to anybody.  The whole knob v click controversy was simply a marketing ploy from a small start up radio company a decade ago.  (they even put it on a T-Shirt)  The radio has had some form of knob available since its inception and the distinction was always artificial.  I have 3 different kinds of knobs if I want to use them.  The latest one we developed I really like.  I like the form, the ergonomics, the small footprint on the desk, the feel and its amazing flexibility. 

73  W9OY     

 

I don't see SDR's as converging into something like a K3 with an internal screen at all.  The F5K has multiple modes of freq entry from direct entry, to mouse point and click, or mouse drag, to mouse control of two independent receivers.  It also is completely controllable from things like skimmer, and if you are running split, you can independently control either VFO A(rx) or VFO B(tx) freq from skimmer simply by turning on and off split.  We recently introduced a controller that can control every aspect of frequency input including VFO A, VFO B, RIT, XIT, step size 2nd RX etc. as well as multiple ways to integrate the these controls.   For example you can have VFO A do 1hz steps so you can fine tune the RX signal and you can have VFO B do 50 hz steps so you can rapidly tune up and down the pileup and did I mention it has a KNOB!!!!  The box approach belongs to the terrible lizards of ham radio (dinosaurs).

If you run through the blog entries of March and April I have reviewed the many faces of frequency control in the land of Flex including the development of the controller and a mention of DH1TW's fine addition 

w9oy-sdr.blogspot.com

73  W9OY

I think my old Ten TEC 580 delta was the last of the "real" QSK radios built.  After that phase locked loops were introduced and "QSK" has been a down hill process ever since.  True QSK requires the full duplex of separate receivers and transmitters and separate antennas and enough dynamic range and AGC action without overshoot to allow you to get to "no AGC" very quickly.  This was managed years ago by large distances between transmitting plants and receiving stations.   No radios of today actually run QSK.  They run some kind of QSK simulation.  I have friends who are capable of very high speed rag chew in the 100 wpm range.  The 580 which used no loops and had an audio derived AGC was said by them to be capable of something like 125wpm QSK.  Something like the Orion with loops, IF derived AGC and DSP is capable at best of about 60 wpm due to the "lag" in the radio. 

Rather than modeling the experience of "QSK" radios which are at best emulating some kind of pretense of QSK I think it would be wiser to model systems that actually allow for most efficient communications.  In the case of for example a high speed rag chew with a station that is -50 dBm on a pretty quiet band, (say 80M on a week day morning) you don't need a lot of filtering so you can choose to maximize the QSK-ness of the radio.  Inversely if you are trying to dig a station 1 dB out of the noise on 160M, you need filters absolutely as tight as possible.  12hz filters give you a significant SNR advantage and the rate of data transfer is inherently slow in this type of communication to the point that "QSK" become virtually worthless or at least not relevant and the only thing that really matters is an adequate TR say something less than 60 ms  So these define 2 different boundary sets based on different operating needs in these 2 examples and of course there are dozens of possible other boundaries that could be defined.  For example in standard PSK31 style QSO's TR is measured in seconds not ms so there is some other boundary that could and should be optimized in the case of PSK31 with virtually no thought given to the QSK-ness of the radio.

The interesting thing about the flex system is you can bring all of these parameters like the DSP buffer settings and TR settings etc out in a CAT format and use macros to set up the radio to EXACTLY do what is needed to accomplish the communications goal, and you can make the radio behave using a series of stepwise changes as well.

For example ZZHUp1; sets the CW receive buffer size and that can be combined with ZZHVp1; which sets transmit buffer size on CW, and ZZCDp1; sets the break-in delay.  So you could write a macro that would set up your radio for that high speed 80M rag chew and another macro that sets up your radio to try and listen for the VU4 who will be way the hell down in the noise come sunrise.  You could also set the AGC slope, and set the AGC-t level, set diversity, set which antennas are active, (dipole vs vertical for example) etc etc for each different communications situation all with the press of a single button. 

This is how I have my radio set up using the Flex system and DDUTIL.  The antennas and amps all switch automatically as well as the internal parameters of the radio.  The point is much of what is needed for a better mousetrap is already in the radio if you take the time to figure out how to make it express itself.

73  W9OY

Best sounding eeak signal hf radio for under 2k is the flex 3000.

73 W9OY