[Elecraft] RE: K2 playing second fiddle to TT Orion?

Tue May 27 06:55:02 2003

Here is a letter I recently my brother regarding this subject.

Mike,
About RX performance, You are right, almost all major radios have an rx
sensitivity of .1 to .2uV but I think that's just what the radio can detect,
not necessarily what you will be able to hear. Last year my friend Lyn,W5UOV
and I went up to the top of Mt hood for the CW worldwide SSB contest he
brought his IC-718 and I brought my K2/100. We had two antennas one 20m
Hamstick on the top of the truck and a 40m inverted vee hanging from a 50'
light pole. I connected to the Hamstick and he connected to the vee. We
turned our radios on and I remember his radio coming alive with static and
what seemed to be band noise and mine was was almost as quiet as if it were
off. I said "ah my antenna sucks, your gonna make all the contacts" He said
"well trade me then until I get the hang of this" (it was his first contest)
so we swapped coax and fired em up, Exact same results! I thought "Crap, my
rig is dead" I tuned around 40m and found someone calling "CQ worldwide" He
was about a 5-5, I could hear him loud and clear but he was not moving the
meter. I told Lyn to go to the same freq, I wanted to see how much louder
the signal was on his rig so I could make an educated guess as to how much
work it was going to be to fix the K2. But when he got to the freq we could
barely hear the guy on his radio, just a bit of garbled speech deep under
the noise floor, I would say a 2-2. I was like "what the hell" we switched
antennas again to put the big one on his radio and the result was almost
exactly the same. In fact even with no antenna connected, his radio was
noisy as hell. The K2 without an antenna (even with the volume all the way
up sounds almost completely silent).
That's when I understood what all those Elecraft nuts were talking about. 
Huge dynamic range, bottomless noise floor, How it is not affected by strong
nearby signals and such. Since it was tested in the ARRL lab a few years ago
the K2 has pretty much held the top spot for overall rx performance. (short
of some $15,000 Rockwell or Harris lab equipment).
 Ten-Tec just released the "Orion" it costs almost $3,500 and THEY claim it
has bumped the K2 out of the top spot. I don't think they would lie but I
will wait until the ARRL does the tests. I think it's kind of funny that TT
makes a $3,500 rig and then will show you how it performs better than a $600
radio that Joe Q. Ham had to put together and align himself on his kitchen
table!! According to TT here are the top five radios in order of RX
performance.
Ten-Tec Orion, Elecraft K2, Yaesu FT1000MP MKV, Kenwood TS-2000, Icom
IC-756ProII 

73 de Larry 

Original message:
From: "Dave" <[email protected]> 

> > Sadly, it looks like the K2 has been beaten into second place by the Ten

>Tec 
> > Orion... receive performance data on the following web site: 
> > 
> > http://www.tentec.com/TT565.htm 
> > 
> > The good news is that a K2 doesn't cost $3,300 and at least the K2 
> > (according to Ten Tec's web site) "beats" the FT1000MP MK V ! 
> > 
> > 73 Dave, G4AON 
> > K2 #1892 