The wide clicks that I have noticed come from a lot of the autotune and solid state amplifiers. Many owners of these amplifiers use ALC for protection. When the amp is not tuned correctly or the VSWR is slightly off
these combinations of amplifiers and certain radios cause wideband broad keyclicks. These clicks can go very wide, far wider than just ordinary keying sidebands. You also get problems when switching between the amp and the radio is not perfect.
When you watch these stations on a SDR or Panadapter its like watching wave in the ocean, as it rolls toward the shore. In this case wide clicks or sidebands roll away from the signal and then settles down. You however still hear the keyclicks. With the wide spread availability of SDR radios and pan adapters everyone should really be monitoring their signal quality and the SDR is perfect tool for doing so. With the peak hold turned you can see the signature of the destructive keying spikes and how it takes out several KHZ causing QRM. This problem seems to very prevalent with Acom 2000 amplifiers and certain radios.
It seems clicks during CW contests have become the norm, its really hard to believe we have gone backwards in regards to total keying bandwidth in this day and age. Today we should have radios producing perfect narrow band CW keying but this is not the case today.
Ideally if someone produced a piece of software for a SDR receiver it should have a narrow band occupied bandwidth MASK which quickly give a pass or fail on your signal. Its just very hard to convince manufacturers and authors
of the SDR software too implement such features. All they concerned about is useless features and coarse resolution bandwidths. LINRAD by SM5BSZ has got the best set of tools for determining occupied bandwidth of SSB and CW signals. There is no piece of SDR software or pan-adapter that has the same ability to determine and monitor occupied bandwidth, they all just eye candy monitors when they could be good spectrum analyzers.
In 160 m contests, there were usually two type of CW signals: with wide clicks and with narrow clicks. When seen on a panadapter, these signals had a distinct narrow peak.
In the last 160 m contests there were a few extra patterns:
1. Like with wide clicks but cut neatly about +-200Hz from carrier
2. Noisy (less distinct peak)
3. Noisy and wide with streaks every 100 Hz.
Clicks come mostly from too rapid rise/decline, as shown on W8Ji pages. Where would teh other types come from?
Ignacy, NO9E