[Elecraft] K2 vs. Drake 2B - New vs. classic.

[Fred Jensen]

N2EY at aol.com wrote:
> The real Standard of Comparison among ham receivers of those days was the 
> Collins 75S-3. And for what they cost, they should have been!
> 

Well ... YMMV, but next to each other on the same antenna, my 2B was a 
significantly better CW rx, particularly in heavy QRM and/or adjacent 
key clix, than my 75S3.  The mech filter sounded really good, of course, 
but that 50KHz IF PBT really killed QRM.  I also had the 2BQ, which was 
very smooth also, but I tended not to use it very much.  It did ring 
badly at high gain settings.

Compared to the K2, I can only remember the 75S3 and 2B (they're long 
gone) and my memory is a tad leaky these days, but I think in an A/B/C 
test, the K2 RX would come out on top in a real, on-the-air test in SS 
or IARU, possibly by a fair margin, if you've judiciously set your 
filters to sensible bandwidths.

RX specs are important of course (I *am* an engineer), but the final 
analysis for me was always "how well does it perform in noise, QRM, and 
real band conditions.  Top-flight specs usually perform very well in the 
real world.  Sometimes, circumstances just combine, and 
less-than-top-flight RX engineering specs may couple with the right 
combination of design features to perform extremely well.  Possibly that 
might have been the 2B?

The 75S3 was a really great RX, no doubt and I wish I still had my 
S-line.  eBay has Collins pointer knobs for $34.95 and the 11-pin 
connectors for $15.00, but I didn't find any complete S-lines.

Fred K6DGW
Auburn CA CM98lw