Panadapter Signal During Transmit

When we first built the radio, we realized that much of the time the transmitter does not overload the receiver during transmit and you can see your on-air signal as it comes back into the receiver. This seemed like a good way to see what was going on, so we left it. Later we found that some mixing of on-air signals and other signals in the receiver result in some visible spurs or other anomalies that are not actually on-air. We discussed several options for how to best present the data. In PowerSDR, we just FFT the TX data (show you what we HOPE is going out over the air) and show that to you, but with the 6000, you could be looking at 14MHz of bandwidth and so we would have to build this FFT that adjusts for how much bandwidth you are looking at, where it is offset in the panadapter (since the receiver is no longer always in the center of the panadapter), etc. All of this seemed like a lot of work when we could be working on things that helped operators with better reception, more features etc. In the end, after several discussions, we decided that we would leave it as it is and explain that all of what you see is not always going out over the air, but in general what you see in the filter passband during transmit is very representative of what is going out over the air. As engineers, everyone in our office preferred the radio to behave this way -- we felt better seeing what was going out over the air in our receiver, even if we had to learn that some things are "glitches" that are not real on-air. We decided that if there was much fussing, we could hide all of the offending signals by FFTing the transmit signal at a later date and showing you what is sent to the PA rather than what comes out of the PA. This solution, which is employed by most radios, hides anything that happens in the PA that is bad. For example, if you had a real issue in your PA, you would never be able to tell from what you see in the panadapter. For me, personally, this is a lesser of two evils solution. In engineering, sometimes there is not a solution that makes everything do exactly what you want. Having said this, I believe this is the only amateur radio that let's you actually see through the receiver what it is transmitting on air and I like this solution. I'd be interested how others feel.