I have looked at the operating manual for the K1EL WinKeyer ICs, which would fall in the external keyer. The manual is virtually a text book on nuances around the art of sending morse code. For example, here is short commentary on the problem of break-in keying that shows we aren't the first to appreciate this problem...
"WinKeyer addresses problems often encountered when keying older transceivers with slow break in
response. Due to a slow receive to transmit changeover time, the first dit or dah of a letter sequence can be
chopped and reduced in length. Adding a fixed amount to the first element of a sequence can compensate
for this ... A challenge in this scheme is to determine when sending has stopped long enough to cause the transceiver
to switch back to receive. If it has it’ll require a new first element correction on the next sequence. WinKeyer
uses the PTT tail timer to determine this" (I copied everything in the quotes from the WinKeyer manual)
So, we sbitx folks have got really ambitious expectations. To get fast break-in, we've already got fast relay-less T/R switching. But in the short break between dits and dahs at high speed is it reasonable to expect we can collect a long enough set of samples, convert to audio and hear something meaningful, while continuing to poll for the state of the keyer? Analog rcvrs do seem to have an easier problem ...
It's working surprisingly well I think, and it's going to get better.
--
Mike KB2ML
