Things I Learned: Programming the Picokeyer for Rockmite Using /R

Ohhh, oh this one was kind of painful. I've spent... a lot of time trying to master the /R function of the picokeyer, (think the amount of time it takes for a video game level the first time.) In the end,all the issues were mine, but wow.

So, the /R command when recording message on the picokeyer repeats the last word of Morse code. At first, I thought I couldn't get the command to work becuase I wasn't used to banging out a Morse code 'slash' character, and that was certainly part of it. The bigger part though, for me, was learning to evenly space my letters. Without doing this, I got results that just seemed weird for the longest time. I'd get things like

KD0FNR R R

KD0FNR NR NR

and I shoudl have thought things through. I've mentioned before that NR sounds like /, but the instructions for the keyer specifially mentioned that to get a slash character out I'd need to enter two slash characters in a row. So, when I heard what sounded like the slash character being output, I should have realized that it wasn't (since I'd never input slash-slash). It was in fact, NR being repeated because Id' left too big of a space between 0 and NR so that the keyer thought NR was a word on its own.

Once I spaced my characters evenly, the picokeyer worked correctly, (it always had), and I got the entire callsign repeated as desired!

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