[Elecraft] K3 in the CQWW contest

[Brendan Minish]

I ran my K3 in the Contest and managed to achieve a claimed score of 
1,917,035 in the single operator High power all bands, assisted 
category. I operated for around 32 Hours and foolishly slept though the 
Saturday morning greyline after staying up too late at the start of the 
contest.
This is by far my best result to date in the CQWW CW contest and I found 
the K3's performance outstanding.

antennas here are, Inverted L (160m), 80m Inverted V Dipole, 40M-10M  M2 
7-10-30 Log Yagi (&. 2x ~150m long  reversible beverages for receive. I 
use an Acom 1000 Amp

I used the K3 in diversity mode nearly all all the time. It really 
helped with picking out calls quickly when running, even on the bands 
(20m and up) where the beverages are lacking in receive sensitivity, 
diversity mode helped by creating a stereo image for the stronger 
stations which in turn helped with picking out the weaker stations 
underneath. It sure is good to be able to pull out JA's and VK's when 
running on 80m from under a pileup of EU stations.
Once you get used to diversity CW it's hard to go back to non-diversity.

As far as the filtering goes it was fantastic. A Funny thing happened on 
80m when I Picked a frequency that was clear and a few hundred Hz away 
from an RA station, I did call QRL? a few times before starting my run. 
He obviously felt I was a bit close to his run frequency so He spotted 
me with a comment to the effect that I should listen more carefully! 
Once the spot hit the cluster system I had a big run, perhaps not the 
spotter's desired result ;-0

On the first night I had some power line noise on 160m on occasions and 
the DSP noise blanker was able to take this out without destroying the 
Receiver performance in the process.

There were some stations that had horrible Keyclicks on TX, this is not 
always simply down to poor transmitters, Using Amplifier ALC, can if not 
  carefully set up make even the cleanest transmitter generate Clicks 
and crud

73's
Brendan EI6IZ