[Elecraft] K3

[Craig Rairdin]

It has actually "piqued" your interest, but either way, you're interested,
and that's good. :-)

I did some side-by-side tests with my K2 and K3 tonight and made a couple
interesting observations.

1) Both receivers did a similar job on weak signals. I'm sure the K3 is
better by the numbers but it's hard to find the exact signal on the air to
demonstrate that. I found when a signal faded to unreadable on the K2 it was
also unreadable on the K3 and vice-versa.

2) The K3 has more volume available. There were times at Field Day last year
that I was running full volume on the K2, what with visitors making a racket
and the generator running. (Actually the most distracting thing about the
generator was the smell. We ran biodiesel and it smelled like french fries
all weekend. Mmmmm.... French fries....). Where was I? Oh, yeah, the K3 can
be cranked up louder.

3) When I disconnect the antenna from the K2 I get a lot of hiss. When I
disconnect the antenna from the K3 it goes silent. Which leads to my next
point...

4) The S-meter on the K2 sat at about S3 when listening to a weak signal.
The S-meter on the K3 generally sat at S0 and bounced around in the S2 or S3
range when my target signal was transmitting.

Finally, this probably won't happen every time you have a problem with your
K3, but a couple days ago I reported that I was losing most of the audio
when I cranked the filter bandwidth below 350 hz, and today version 1.34 of
the MCU software was announced and the problem is gone. So, a) that's pretty
cool, and b) the software to download and install the update to the K3 is
idiot-proof (unless part of your idiocy is that you're not running Windows
-- but even then, OSX and Linux clients are in the works).

Craig
NZ0R
K3/100 #25
K2/100 #4941
K1 #1966
KX1 #1499

-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of rattray
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 5:32 PM
To: Elecraft
Subject: [Elecraft] K3



To the people who are actually operating K3s on the air, please keep those
reports coming on the Elecraft reflector - I'm reading every one of them as
I'm considering whether or not I should purchase a K3 - I must admit the
report about being able to copy cw as a single signal in crowded conditions
sure has peaked my interest! - tnx & 72 - Bruce. -ps- of course what's
happening to the Cdn dollar is helping too :-))

72/73 - Bruce ve5rc/ve5qrp - QRP-C#1, QRP-L#886, A1 Operator
            QRP-Canada - http://www.qrp-canada.com