[Elecraft] Am bandwidth and other things

[Brett Gazdzinski]

I had a very good 'ham radio' weekend, Saturday, I had a long QSO on 80 
meters with the K2 on SSB, it did great at 15 watts out!
I hooked up a half decent dynamic microphone and was told the K2 sounded 
good, not ESSB but nice.

Today, I was on AM with the homebrew rig, in a large group, and was 
surprised to hear someone on using a K3!
I don't know what microphone he was using but the K3 sounded very thin.
It was the first K3 I have heard on the air on any mode.

Since it was a very large group, I did not get to ask about the Microphone 
and so on, but almost all the modern rigs sound better on AM than the K3 
did.


On the positive side, I did not notice the audio getting into the alc like 
it does on some radios, which shows up as reducing the carrier under 
modulation, and the audio sounded clean.

In my book, most of the modern rigs do poorly on AM receive as far as 
distortion, noise and frequency response go, limiting the low end response 
to something like 200 or 100 Hz, but listen to some good AM on an old tube 
receiver with push pull 6L6's, or the detector output of an R390 into a hifi 
amplifier, and its a whole other thing.

What really surprises me is how good the K2 sounds on ssb receive, with an 
outboard hifi speaker, listening to the essb guys.

Brett
N2DTS