[Elecraft] K3 VOX & AntiVox... WOW... GREAT WORK Lyle!

[Tom Hammond]

Lyle:

Being a 99.5% CW op, I seldom (ever) operate fone... heck, I can 
seldom FIND the mic for that matter.  But this afternoon, while 
waiting for Wayne to respond to a couple questions I had submitted to 
him, I cranked the K3 up to the (shudder) fone band on 20M, just to 
see if I cold get it to operate on fone, and to see how well the VOX worked.

I must say that one of the reasons I have always HATED operating fone 
in VOX mode in the past was the constant clicking of T-R relays and 
having to almost shout into the mic in order to overcome the ANTI VOX 
gain required by many of the (older) rig's I'd used in the past. I 
also hated it when the mic would trip repeatedly as a result of the 
audio being picked up by the mic from the speaker... I've never(!) 
had/used a rig which had what I considered to be decent ANTI VOX.

Well... NOW I HAVE!

Golly... I am absolutely amazed at what you have done with the K3's 
DSP to allow for such absolutely CLEAN VOX operation.  I was 
expecting to have to diddle with the VOX GAIN initially, to set it 
for my voice level, and THEN, to have to FIGHT with the ANTI VOX in 
order to compensate for the amount of VOX GAIN I'd chosen.

That never happened...!  In my Field Test K3, the VOX GAIN had been 
defaulted to a value of 30 (if I recall) and the ANTI VOX to 100.  So 
I started out using those values.  Using a Heil hand mic intended for 
an Icom radio, I found that I was able to crank the VOX GAIN back to 
about 10-15 and still had more than ample VOX sensitivity. Then, to 
my absolute amazement, I found that I could crank the ANTI VOX level 
all the way down to 0 (zero) and I STILL could not force the speaker 
audio to 'falsely' trip the VOX...!!!  And I tried pretty hard... I 
even held the mic up in front of the speaker, about 2" away and still 
it was stable.

I then cranked the VOX DELAY down to 200 mS (0.2S) and worked a 
station in Croatia with what was almost syllabic VOX... being able to 
listen between even short pauses in speaking... not quite between 
words (I didn't want to press my luck THIS time), but it sure is sweet!

I'm still a died-in-the-wool CW op, but I must say that what I've 
seen so far from your efforts with the K3 DSP on the SSB features 
wouldn't take much to have me operating fone a LOT more frequently.

And Wayne, I KNOW you're listening too... the latest changes you've 
made to the K3's firmware have really made the QSK sweet... quiet and 
FAST.  I now consider it to be as good as that of my TS-930S, which I 
always felt had some of the very best QSK ever offered in an HF 
rig... bar none.

Field Testing this rig is just getting funner and funner as the days go on.

73,

Tom   N0SS  K3 #0008