Hello all. First off, I'm rather a CW (and HF in general) newbie and want to do things right. This question might also fit into the digital forum but since CW is involved, I will post it in both forums and get both the CW and the digital gurus' points of view.
I have been looking into the Rigblasters and saw where it says that it will send CW with the soundcard programs that send CW. There are several models of Rigblaster. The new Plus model claims to send true keyed CW while the M8 model says it sends CW by sending a pure audio tone while you transmit with your rig in SSB mode. My questions regarding this are several:
First, is this the right way to go about sending CW? Are there any issues about doing it this way that make it harder for the staion at the other end to zero beat or even receive my signal? Has anyone sent CW using either model of Rigblaster and/or either method and how well do they work?
Second, from the other end, are there any issues with MY zero beating of the other station's signal? In other words, how hard is it to be sure that I am transmitting on the correct frequency for him when using SSB and an audio tone through the soundcard? The idea being to not take up too much bandwidth with our QSO if our transmit freqs are farther apart than they have to be.
I would just get the Plus model and be done with it, except there is also a notation on the Rigblaster web page that the plus model cannot seperate the left and right channels of the soundcard and the M8 model can do this and the reason this is important is that for applications like remote access using the internet, the left/right seperation is important for full duplex and this sounds like something that might be interesting to me in the future.
Thanks in advance for any help or insight that you can give. I try research my purchases beforehand so as to not have to make them twice and as a lurker I have seen a lot of questions answered in these forums and have learned a lot just by reading......73