[Elecraft] K3 findings

[Dave G4AON]

Jim

My K3 is working well and I've worked plenty of DX with it this 
afternoon in the CQWW CW contest on 40m, the line up is K3 to an Acom 
1000 linear to 1/4 wave fishing pole vertical with a 32' wire fed 
against 16 radials cut into the lawn. O/P is the UK legal limit of 400W. 
Best DX this afternoon has been China and Thailand. I'm not being too 
serious in the contest, just having a play.

When I was thinking the K3 sounded poor on 40m CW, I compared it with my 
K2 and Kenwood TS-480 - it was down to variable band conditions and the 
K3 is the best receiver of the three. I also thought on 80m SSB the K3 
was sounding a bit rough, then I did an A/B/C/D comparison including my 
Drake R4A receiver in the line up, there was nothing wrong with the K3 
and even on 80m SSB in the middle of the morning it sounds better than 
the others. I had suspected DSP might have caused poor quality audio 
compared to the "pure" audio of the Drake, but it didn't turn out to be 
the case with the K3 sounding noticeably better than even the Drake.

The audio effects (AFX) is really neat, you get an adjustable delay 
between each ear when using headphones - it sounds like you are 
listening to someone in the room rather than the usual "middle of your 
head" effect from wearing headphones.

Transmit audio reports with a Kenwood MC-43S microphone have been very 
favourable. Transmit average power levels are good with no "overshoot" 
on speech peaks at full power or lower (checked on LP-100 peak reading 
Wattmeter and an oscilloscope). The CW waveform looks good with nicely 
rounded edges and again no overshoot on reduced power output, reports 
are good too. The manual and auto notch are good, I like the facility to 
manually notch out an interfering signal when on CW.

On a negative side, the memories could do with a bit of work. I would 
have expected to be able to easily switch through the memories and 
listen to each one in turn, by rotating one of the VFO knobes yet this 
doesn't seem to be currently offered or mentioned in the manual (you 
select memories by rotating VFO A, but it doesn't let you listen to them 
as you turn the knob). Another item that could perhaps do with a little 
polish is the auto ATU, it's much faster at tuning than the one in my K2 
but the rig seems to like tuning every time the button is pressed... I 
would have expected it to remember and not bother re-tuning when the 
frequency hasn't changed. I would also like to see one of the "PF" 
buttons being able to output a carrier at reduced level for linear and 
external ATU tuning. Both the memory and "PF" linear tune features are 
on Kenwood transceivers costing half that of a K3.

73 Dave, G4AON
K3/100 #80

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Those who have their K-3 operational I know you are probably enjoying
operating the rig but can you share your experiences operating the rig, it's
getting kind of boring hearing when people have ordered & no shipment plus
the no email reply.