CW (beta)¶

The CW page is the third screen in the carousel: swipe left from the Panadapter to reach FT8, and left again for CW. The spectrum and waterfall keep running behind it, so you still see the band while you operate. The page ships on - it is this release's own beta. Turn it off with cw_page_enabled = no in a config file, or {"action":"cw_enable","on":false} over the API, if you would rather not have it yet.

!!! warning "There is no abort for a message in progress" KY has no abort in the QMX's CAT manual. Tested on the bench: neither sending RX; nor bouncing the mode away from CW and back stops an in-flight send - both were tried and both simply had no effect, the keyer ran to completion either way. Once you tap a memory, it sends to the end. Keying the radio itself is confirmed working, off air, by the operator.

The page is built for one-handed, gloved, field operation — the kind of CW you do standing at a picnic table with a paddle you have not touched in a month.

The screen¶

Left pane, top to bottom:

Control	What it does
MODE: CW	Header. The page forces the radio into CW mode whenever you enter it.
WPM with `-` / `+`	Keyer speed, read back from the radio so the number always matches what the QMX itself thinks.
Park	Your POTA park reference, used by the `{PARK}` macro. Tap to edit.
NEXT	The one-tap QSO ladder — see Running a QSO.
Six memory buttons	Your keyer messages.
Status line	What the radio is doing: receiving, keying, or how many characters are left to send.
General / Contest toggle (bottom of the panel)	Switches between two named sets of six macros — see Macro sets. Placed at the very bottom, separated from the memory buttons by the status line, so it cannot be mis-hit while working the macros above it.

Right of the pane: the live spectrum and waterfall, the decode ticker along the bottom, the copilot hint line just above it, and the station card when a callsign has been heard.

Band discipline¶

The CW page only lets you operate the CW portion of the band. That is deliberate:

Entering the page moves you into the band's CW segment if you were somewhere else.
Changing band lands you in the middle of that band's CW segment.
Tuning — by tap, drag, band-plan strip or keypad — is clamped to the CW segment. You cannot accidentally tune into the phone portion while on this page.
The band-plan strip below the spectrum shows only the CW segment, and the filter is set to 300 Hz on entry.

The segment boundaries come from the band plan for your region, which you can set in Settings → Band-plan region.

Memory messages¶

Six slots, each with macros expanded when you send:

Macro	Becomes
`{MYCALL}`	Your callsign from Settings
`{PARK}`	The park reference from the Park button
`{CALL}`	The station you are working

Sending and editing:

Tap a memory to send it. The button lights light grey while your finger is down so you can see which one will fire.
Drag up or down without lifting to move to a different button — useful because the buttons are narrow and a fingertip covers more than one. Lift on the one you want.
Hold for 800 ms and the editor opens immediately, with your finger still down. The hold timer restarts whenever you slide to a different button, so taking your time to aim never opens the editor by accident.
An empty slot opens the editor when tapped.

The editor shows all six messages at once, so you can set up a whole activation in one visit.

Macro sets¶

The toggle at the bottom of the panel switches between two independent sets of six macros, each with its own editor:

General — everyday CQ/exchange messages. The default macros use 599 for the signal report.
Contest — the same six slots, with 5NN in place of 599. Whichever signal report you actually sent is scanned from the text at send time, so the log always records what went out, not a hard-coded assumption.

Edit either set by holding a memory button as above — the editor's title names which set you are editing, and a toggle tap elsewhere mid-edit cannot redirect where Save writes to.

Reading the band¶

The decode ticker shows what the QMX's own CW decoder hears, letter by letter as it arrives.

With no signal, a CW decoder produces a steady dribble of single characters — T T T T T. The ticker squelches these: when the same lone letter repeats, it is shown twice and then suppressed until something else arrives. A lone R, K or N, and EE, are never filtered, because those are real. The filter only affects what is displayed — callsign capture and the hints always see the raw stream, so nothing can be lost to it.

The copilot hint line sits just above the ticker and says what the copy meant, in plain language:

You see	It means
W1AW is calling CQ — tap the card to answer	Someone is calling and you may answer
W1AW is activating a park — tap the card to work them	A POTA activation (`CQ POTA`)
W1AW is answering YOU — tap the card to work them	They came back to your call
That was YOUR callsign	Your call went by
That was a signal report: 599	A report was sent
That was their park reference: US-1211	A POTA reference was sent
They are signing off (73 / TU)	The contact is ending
They want a repeat — send it again	`AGN` / `PSE`
QRZ — they are asking who called

Hints are green when there is something to act on and amber otherwise, and they clear after about 25 seconds so a stale reading never sits beside newer copy.

This is what makes the page usable if you cannot yet copy CW by ear: the ticker gives you the letters, the hint tells you what just happened, and NEXT tells you what to send back.

The station card appears when a callsign is heard, showing the country, whether you have worked them before (and on this band), the report they sent you, and their park reference if they gave one. Tap the card to start working them; tap again to drop them.

Listening: the two audio paths, and what each one can do¶

The Tab5 and the QMX produce separate audio from the same receiver, and knowing which is which is the difference between a setup that works first time and an evening of fighting it.

	QMX headphone output	Tab5 output (speaker or headphones)
Source	the QMX's own demodulator	the raw I/Q stream over USB
Carries your keying sidetone	yes	no, and it never will
Stereo separation of two stations	no	yes — Binaural CW
Set its level with	the radio's volume (or QMX volume in the drawer)	RX Volume in Resource Management

The two volumes are completely independent. Measured on the bench 2026-11-02: moving the QMX's AF gain across its whole useful range — 0 dB, then 40 dB, a factor of 100 in amplitude, each confirmed by the radio's own read-back — changed the level arriving over USB by nothing at all. I/Q mode carries the samples from before the QMX's audio chain, so the radio's volume and its RF gain both stay on the radio's side of the glass. Turn the QMX right down and the Tab5 keeps playing at exactly the same level.

The Audio chapter covers the rest of the audio path — the AGC, the pan controls, and listening in a browser. What follows here is only what a CW operator has to decide.

Why the Tab5 cannot give you a sidetone¶

Its playback path is about 100 ms deep — ~80 ms of I2S buffering, up to 48.5 ms inside the codec write, plus a ~21 ms processing frame. A dot at 20 WPM lasts 60 ms, so the tone would begin after the element that produced it had already ended, and under QSK you would hear the previous character while sending the next. This is measured, it is the Tab5's own latency rather than the radio's, and no setting changes it. FlexRadio reach the same conclusion about their own hardware: the sidetone is delivered by whatever device is doing the keying.

So your keying monitor always comes from the QMX.

Binaural CW needs both ears¶

Binaural CW (stereo separation) in Resource Management splits the CW passband the radio has already chosen into its lower and upper halves and pans them left and right, with a little cross-feed so a dead-centre station still sits in the middle. Two stations either side of your pitch then separate spatially instead of blurring into one note.

Three things to know:

It needs RX Audio switched on first — the effect is produced on the Tab5.
It applies in CW and CW-R only. Every other mode is plain mono whatever this is set to.
⛔ Do not split your headphones between the two radios while it is on. One ear then gives you one half of the passband and only a trace of the other, so you would lose stations on the far side of your own pitch. If you want the QMX in one ear and the Tab5 in the other, turn Binaural CW off and accept mono on the Tab5 side.

The recommended setup for working stations by paddle¶

Both ears on the Tab5 with Binaural CW on, and the QMX's sidetone switched into those same headphones on key-down — an analog audio switch driven from PTT. That is the only arrangement that gives you spatial separation while receiving and a monitor with correct QSK timing, because the switch moves the audio in hardware with no buffer in the way. The design is Michael KZ4LY's.

Without a switch you have to choose one:

Both ears on the Tab5 — best receiving, no keying monitor.
QMX in one ear, Tab5 in the other, Binaural CW off — a monitor in one ear and mono receive in the other.

On the radio's side, whichever you pick, set the monitor so it stops moving when you change receive volume:

In the QMX's CW menu set Sidetone abs/rel to Absolute.
Set Sidetone volume to taste.

Left at the factory setting of Relative, the main volume control moves the received audio and your sidetone together by the same amount, so you cannot bring the receive level down without taking your own monitor with it. The CW monitor level row in the settings drawer sets both of these from the Tab5, and reads them back from the radio rather than keeping its own copy.

Running a QSO¶

The NEXT button always shows exactly what it will send. One tap sends it and advances:

CQ — sends your CQ memory. Stays here, listening.
Report — once a station is adopted, sends <their call> plus your report memory.
TU + log — sends your closing memory and writes the QSO to the ADIF log.

A station is adopted automatically when the decoder hears your call followed by DE <their call> shortly after your CQ. You can also adopt anyone by tapping the station card, which is how you answer someone else's CQ. Long-press NEXT to drop the contact and go back to CQ.

The logged contact records mode CW, the report you sent, and the report you received only if it was actually decoded — a report that was never exchanged is left out of the log rather than invented.

Practice mode (no radio needed)¶

Settings → CW Simulation Mode (or a three-finger hold on this page) turns it into a practice bench. A red border around the screen shows it is active, and the radio is never keyed while it is on — the status line says "Simulated:" rather than "Keying:" so a glance always tells you which is happening.

The simulated band behaves like a real one:

Stations call CQ on their own every half-minute or so, some of them park activations, so you can practise answering rather than only being answered.
The copy is imperfect. Characters are dropped and mis-timed into neighbouring letters — E becomes I, T becomes M — exactly the way a real decoder fails. Callsigns are usually still readable because real CW repeats them, which is the skill the page is teaching.
The band has noise between transmissions.
Whoever you are working answers you through the whole exchange, and the QSO logs to ADIF like any other.

Practice contacts are logged with no frequency, which marks them as test records — the ADIF viewer's "Del N test" button removes them in two taps when you are done.

Turning simulation off clears the ticker, the hint, the station card and the ladder, so no phantom contact is left looking like real copy.

Gestures¶

The spectrum and waterfall behind the pane take the same touch gestures as the Panadapter page: pinch with two fingers to zoom and pan together (pan comes from how far the midpoint between your fingers moves, so a drag with roughly steady finger spacing pans without zooming much), and a one-finger swipe to pan without retuning. A three-finger hold toggles CW Simulation Mode on or off, the same gesture FT8 uses for its own simulator.

Known limitations¶

No abort for a message in progress (see the warning at the top) — both tested candidates (RX;, a mode bounce) were tried and neither works.
Zero-beat tuning aid and speed matching are designed but not yet built; both need real signals to develop against.