My last few activation’s have noticed that the number of stations all exactly zero beat in the pileup has grown and grown making pulling out a call difficult. I am wondering does this match the number of IC7300’s out there and that Autotune button on the front panel ?
Yesterday while activating and working Mario DJ2MX I sent to him that all stations are exactly zero beat HI. Straight away after that F4WBN, DJ5AV etc all call slightly off frequency and are easily and quickly in the log. Hopefully more Chasers will learn to copy these good Chasers and leave the Autotune/Zerobeat button alone
It’s been like that for years Dec. There are just a few ops who tune a bit off the zero-beat to stand out. Roy G4SSH always did it and through all the melee you could hear, a bit high, di-di-dit di-di-dit di-di-di-dit as clear as a bell.
Hi Declan,
On an IC-7300 your auto tune depend on your CW Pitch.
Mine is on 750hz and never had a problem with my ears to call activator !
I don’t use the auto tune and generally I’m little bit down the frequency working often with 150hz CW filter
Like Andy say, we have few ops working off up or down the frequency.
If we all worked off zero beat frequency, we would find that calling on zero beat would always win.
Personally I call to the activator right on the frequency where I hear him best. Sometimes is a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower and most of the times right on zero beat frequency.
73,
Dec,
It’s not just the 7300’s, most reasonably new rigs have very small dial errors. So when a particular frequency is spotted and the chasers tune to it they are essentially already zero beat
We should bear in mind that a mere 150 Hz offset might be too much if the other station is using a filter of 300 Hz or less.
I often run with filters wide open, or in a contest never narrower than 500 hz . My point was it seems to have got very noticeable in the last few months that everyone is smack bang on top of each other. I think Ron is probably correct and that guys are clicking on the spot rather than tuning. I really like to listen to a low tone myself, usually 450 hz
I wonder if it would help if more activators [amateurs in general] chose not to work on ‘round numbered’ frequencies, like 14.061 and 14.062, a habit that surely must cause unnecessary frequency-bunching and QRM on crowded bands.
Modern rigs not only have high precision in frequency setting but also the display resolution to match. Following a suggestion [on this reflector] a few years ago, I routinely activate on inter-kHz frequencies like 14.0613 or 14.0627. It won’t prevent the ‘auto tune’ problem but it might spread manually-tuning chasers out a bit.
I also think that most chasers either click on a spot or enter the frequency (to the last digit) on their rig. It has been like this for years but there might be more chasers lately. I like to tune the activator’s signal to the centre of my IF passband as well. But when chasing (mostly S2S), XIT is always set to about +/- 100 Hz on my KX3, though. This is the only chance to break the pile-up of stations with at least 10 dB more output power and directional antennas. Maybe we shouldn’t mention it here too often
From all these posts one can derive two recommendations for CW chasers:
When on zero- beat use XIT (or detune) to move about 200 Hz up or down to stand out of the pile up. I would not go off much more than 300 Hz as you might fall out of the receivers filter pass band.
Listen, listen, listen and find zero-beat of the activator in the first place! I recently made a typo in a self-spot resulting in my spot 500 Hz lower than where I was actually calling. You would not believe the number of callers on the spoted frequency but not on my calling frequency!
Andy,
I have a WW2 backpack radio that keys the MO and PA. It meets your spec. Easy 1 kHz chirp on 3.5 MHz. No trouble with distinguishing it from a 7300. Pity about the 300 mW output and that with new tubes and a fresh set of batteries.
