[Elecraft] More Elecraft K3 in the CQ160 - "I've got the audio"

[Brian Moran]

I used the K3 for the 2nd night (and 2nd morning) of the CQ160 contest. I made MP3 files of my contacts during this period, as well. 

I uploaded selected Q's to http://bmoran.onehub.com/n9adg You can hear for youself some of the EU and Asia stations as I did from here in the Pacific Northwest.  

The K3 setup - 90' Inverted L connected to the main antenna; to the 2nd rcvr input, one of three UNterminated beverages -- 700' long at about 70'. 400' long towards EU. 200' towards Asia. I ran with the 400Hz filter most of the time, although I have the 500 and 250 in the radio as well (both receivers). 
 
The conditions were unusually good here.

In the audio space, the EU signals came from about 2 o'clock, while domestic from about 11 o'clock. It made it easy to run down the band looking for 2 o'clock stations.  High in the band, I was reluctant to use the amplifier where the SWR on the vertical is over 2:1. The conditions were so good I worked C6ANM and G4PWA with 100w.

I *did* have an issue which I think is operator error -- I wanted to put one beverage on the KXV3 RX input, and another on the KRX3 input. However, with the RX antenna  selected, each time I keyed, I faulted my Alpha amplifier. 

We had a similar setup at VP5W, with Pennants for 160m, however I didn't have this issue. Anyone know what it could be? 

The audio setup: The setup was the K3 connected  directly to a Turtle Beach Amigo
external USB sound card, with Audacity (free, with versions for PC and
Mac!) recording. I used N1MM. I noted the exact time that I clicked on
'record' in Audacity.



At the end of the contest, I exported the audio to MP3 files. I wrote a
program that took the ADIF log from N1MM, and using the QSO Time of
each contact, extracted the contacts into individual MP3 files.

Brian N9ADG






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