Pedestrian stuff

 Today I went for another pedestrian mobile activation of US-1518. The bands in a great shape and I could not pass up the opportunity. It was a cold, cloudy day with temperatures in the mid 20s (about -4C). 

I believe the KH-1 has to be quickest radio to deploy on the field in situations where you do not have the radio already configured for operating. So as long as you are comfortable with the 3 supported bands with the built-in whip and tuner, all you have to do is to get the antenna screwed in, and the counterpoise connected. You're off to the races! I chose to work the 20m band today.

In the previous post [https://motopota.blogspot.com/2025/02/qrv-from-sanatorium.html]  I had talked about making a few modifications to make using the KH-1 easier in a pedestrian mobile setting. I had also mentioned difficulty using the pen and paper logging on the field in the cold. The KH-1 has a facility where it can automatically log all the CW characters sent from the rig with timestamps. This is supposed to ease logging in the field. It is enabled very quickly by going into MENU:Logging and turning it on. [See pp. 22 of the printed manual]. The log can hold up to 50000 characters, more than enough for any POTA activation. The logs can then either be browsed on the radio [the 2 line LCD will make it painful...see below] or you can use the data cable and hook up the KH-1 to the computer and use their supplied utility to view the logs.

Built-in logging on KH-1. Notice how the call sign WJ5K and spaces between words are not just right

 

On this activation, I enabled the logging. However, I am not satisfied with the results. The built-in character recognition from the paddle inputs is very picky. First off it seems to be the best at about 19-20WPM. I like to operate at 25-26wpm. But at those speeds the logged characters are not what you sent. For eg. KE8UEX would show up as KE0IEX. I am not sure what Elecraft's idea of a perfect fist is; mine is not perfect but not atrocious either. The issue is present even when I am sitting down at the table; so any issues that are due to less than ideal paddle work when being pedestrian mobile is eliminated. At around 20WPM, the character recognition is mostly good, but the spacing between them is hit and miss. I have looked around for any settings to tweak this but have not found any. So until such a time I am going to stick to paper logging. Let me know in the comments if you use the built-in logging feature and if so how is it working for you.