Receiving
If you are operating phone, or CW using your key and with no wish for computer assistance, you will not be interested in the receiving and transmitting panels. So it is worth mentioning at this point that the small button with an up-arrow at the far right of the status bar at the foot of the window can be used to shrink the window and hide these panels. When the up arrow is shown, a click of the button hides first the receive and then the transmit panels. The button caption then becomes a down arrow which can be used to open up the window again.
The Receiving panel is used to display decoded RTTY, PSK or Morse text which has been received via the serial port from the K3 (when this is supported) or decoded using the internal sound card decoding software. It cannot display text decoded in an external sound card decoder such as Fldigi.
Even in CW mode it is useful to have the received text displayed in this panel, because it allows you to fill in fields in
the logging panel by double-clicking on words in the text instead of typing them with the risk of mistakes. Of course, you still need to decode the CW in your head to be sure that the text displayed is correct, because even the best computer morse decoders are not completely accurate!
When you double-click a word, KComm tries to work out what sort of information the word you clicked on is, and enters it into the correct field. It can distinguish a callsign, report or QTH locator from other text. The first word containing purely alphabetics will be assumed to be the name, the next the QTH.
In cases where there are no spaces separating the information, or if there are unwanted spaces within the text, you can select the text you want with the mouse, then right-click [Linux: middle-click] the text window. A pop-up menu will appear, and you can then pick where to copy the selected text.
Because it can sometimes be difficult selecting text while new text is being added, the pop-up menu has an option to turn off updating of the receive window temporarily. Remember to turn it back on again after you have finished!
PSK using the sound card
If you are operating PSK31 or PSK63 using the internal PSK modem (PSK Core DLL, Windows only) then a small waterfall display with AFC and TX Lock check boxes will appear in the space above the Clear and
Save buttons. This is meant to be used in a similar way to the tuning indicator
on the K3, allowing you to tune in a PSK signal to the selected spot frequency.
This waterfall works similar to the waterfall display in other data mode programs. You can click on a PSK signal on the display to tune in to it. Note that unlike most other PSK programs, when you left-click on a signal that is far from the center line, KComm shifts the transceiver frequency to center the signal in the receiver passband. (The center frequency is defined in the Soundcard settings.)
Left-clicking on the waterfall display changes the both the receive and transmit audio frequency, unless the TX Lock option is selected. Right-clicking the display enables receive AFC for one second, allowing the decoder to fine-tune on to the signal. Use this when decoding stops or produces garbage even though the signal seems to be tuned in and free of interference.
Receiving foreign character sets
If you are receiving data modes such as PSK31 which can transmit the full range of 256 characters then some characters may not print correctly because the sender's computer is using a different character set than yours. In this case, you can change the character set used to display the received text. Right-click the receive window and select Character encoding, then pick a character encoding such as KOI8 (Cyrillic). This setting will stick until you change it.
Note that KComm does not currently support languages that print right-to-left such as Arabic although such encodings can be selected as they are supported by the software libraries used by the program.
Decoding Morse using the sound card
KComm provides an option to decode Morse using the sound card and its own internal decoder software, or (under Windows only) using an external program CW Skimmer or a data mode program that supports CW decoding such as Fldigi.
The internal decoder is experimental and not all that effective. Due to the availability of excellent external decoding programs, further development of it is not a high priority.
The internal decoder has been designed to work in a similar way to the DSP decoder in the Elecraft K3, but using a waterfall in place of the CWT indicator. The waterfall works in a different way than it does for PSK. You cannot click on a signal in the waterfall to start decoding it, as you can with a PSK signal. Instead, you must tune the signal being received to the exact spot frequency, shown by a red line at the center of the display.
Clicking the waterfall in CW mode sends a SPOT command to the K3, which makes the K3 try to tune the signal to the center of the passband. However this is not usually accurate enough for the built-in decoder to work, and you may get better results by adjusting the tuning manually, using the 1Hz resolution of the VFO. The signal must be tuned in precisely or it will not be decoded. Currently the K3's text decoder does a better job of decoding most Morse signals, although it is not currently possible to get the decoded text into KComm's receive window.
Adjusting the audio level
The audio level into the computer must be adjusted so that the red line is dark when no signal is present, but becomes bright when a carrier is present. The decoder will track the speed of the transmission, and this is displayed below the waterfall display. However, if the speed shown is considerably different to the speed of code being sent, the decoder may become confused. If it appears to be adjusting the speed in the wrong direction you can click the label showing the speed and manually change it using a pop-up menu.
You can choose to have decoded Morse code printed as upper case, if that is your preference. The Clear button clears the contents of the receive window, which gets a bit jerky when being updated if it contains a lot of text. The Save button lets you save the received text to a file.
Using CW Skimmer
If you are using the external program CW Skimmer then the KComm receive panel is superfluous and can be closed up. This helps to make room for the CW Skimmer window. CW Skimmer displays decoded text in a scrolling display close to the bottom of the application window,
You can connect KComm to CW Skimmer using the CW Skimmer button on the status bar. When the two programs are connected, you just need to click on a word in the scrolling display - such as a call, name, QTH or locator - and it will be copied to the appropriate field in the KComm log.