[Elecraft] ARRL K3 review for Apr QST posted

[Brendan Minish]

Dave and I may have to differ somewhat on this one ! 

I have been using my K3 regularly on pactor since it first arrived back
in November, admittedly on 3,000 Km + paths.

It's true that the timings initially were too slow for short hop amtor
QSO's, This has now been largely resolved in firmware with some further
speedups promised (and needed for best results).
The Current K3 TX-RX timings in digital-s mode are at as good as most of
the the other DSP IF radios out there 

Dave and I have had issues in tests between us but I am not entirely
convinced that they are timing (or even directly K3) issues. It's a very
short 80m hop between us and amtor can suffer badly under some multipath
conditions . 

On the other hand I have had perfectly OK amtor QSO's with other EU
stations as well as maintaining regular pactor2 and 3 schedules with my
boating Friends.
Pactor Throughput has, in the main been excellent, every bit as good as
it was on the icom IC-7800
Amtor timings are much more critical, the K3 required the digital-s mode
speedups in firmware but looking at the reviews on the ARRL website of
some of the other DSP-IF radios that get the arrl ' amtor capable stamp'
one wonders how they would perform in reality on amtor 

TX-RX turnaround Numbers tabulated from the ARRL reviews, all for radios
they deem 'amtor capable' hope the table is not too messed up 

                TX-RX   RX-RX
elecraft K3 	22msec  ~25msec (not measured by ARRL)

TT orion2	30msec	18msec 
TT OmniVII 	20msec 	18msec
Yaseu ft-2000D 	24msec 	37msec
Yaseu FT-950 	25msec 	39msec
Kenwood TS-480 	23msec 	12msec
Kenwood TS-2000 18msec 	10msec
Icom IC-7800 	15msec 	10msec
Icom IC 756pro3 24msec 	10msec
Icom IC-7000 	24msec 	12msec

it would certainly be nice if it was faster, especially on RX-TX but
it's certainly no laggard, a TXD (TxDelay) setting of 25msec seems
adequate for correct operation

The TNC here is an SCS PTC2E and I have been doing pactor 2/3 with my
boating Friends since 2001 so I know pactor's capabilities well enough
at this stage to spot when things are not going well in the throughput
stakes

www.northabout.com 

73
Brendan EI6IZ 


-- 
Don‘t complain. Nobody will understand. Or care. And certainly don‘t try
to fix the situation yourself. It‘s dangerous. Leave it to a highly
untrained, unqualified, expendable professional.