[Elecraft] K3 SN31's first contest

[AJSOENKE at aol.com]

Hi everyone -
 
One main reason I got a K3 was to be more active in DX and Contesting, now  
that I'm semi-retired. I used to be a very active contester in the late 70s  
early 80s and stayed in it mostly as a club activity since. I was introduced to  
logging software with CT in it's early days and still have a CT V10.x on the  
computer. I truly became tired of the amount of time I spent getting a rig 
ready  for interfacing to a contest software etc. lot of rigblaster and other 
stuff  laying around to help out, but never much satisfaction. With a working 
schedule  it was too much and mostly went by the wayside. My K2 was an 
improvement and  made the listening a lot easier. Interfacing was somewhat easier but 
still  required a lot of homework and interfacing. At least with the K2 it was 
worth  the effort.
 
Ok,  This weekend I had a choice of working in the orchard, with the  fall 
cleanup and yet another Santa Ana wind condition - or - taking a two week  old 
K3 and bridging the gap to get it set up for contesting in CQWW CWDX. I had  
become tired of  CTs endless menus and tricky help files, still stuck  learning  
CT. With CT if I don't use it 4 times a year it's a whole new  learning curve 
each time. I started in earnest Friday about 2pm and decided to  try one of 
the softwares in the Elecraft Web Page. I want to try all of them,  but had 
seen a lot of reference to N1MM and chose that to start with.  At  first glance I 
was overwhelmed with the amount of info, but followed the getting  started 
and Quick start guide to installing and upgrading the latest  version.  I was 
really nice to see that the K3 had already been   formatted in the boilerplate. 
It gives you a sense of 
confidence it might  work sometime this week.  So, given about an hour to get 
the software  installed and read the basics, I gave it a shot. 
 
The rig was already connected to the computer and had the latest upgrade  
installed. The RS232 cable I used is a standard 9 pin interface with all 9 wires  
hooked up. I set the K3 CONFIG: PTT-KEY to rts-dtr, set up the software 
config  to match ( I changed data rate to 38400  and port to 8N1 for the K3 )
 
It took less than 20 minutes to get the rig on the air with a contest  
logger. What an improvement!
 
CU in the contest, break time is over.
 
Al WA6VNN



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