[Elecraft] K3 - Performance on 6M?

[Dave, G4AON]

Jeff, you will probably need a pre-amp with the K3. My experience of 6m 
over the past 3 or 4 years with a 4 ele quad is that many signals are 
very weak and the K3 lacks the sensitivity to deal with them unless you 
either add a pre-amp or have a high level of local noise masking those 
signals.

My K3, serial 80, gives 10 dB SINAD at -126 dBm in a 400 Hz bandwidth 
using the internal pre-amp. Adding an external Advanced Receiver 
Research P50VDG pre-amp via the KXV3 RX ANT IN/OUT sockets improved the 
sensitivity by 10 dBm which is a huge improvement for weak signal work. 
The Elecraft pre-amp is a similar specification and should give similar 
results. For those who compare figures using MDS the "with and without" 
figures in a 400 Hz bandwidth are -136 dBm and -146 dBm. Image rejection 
is marginal at 62 dB.

Power output on 6m is fine and the worse case harmonic is -60 dB.

73 Dave, G4AON
---------------------------------

Hi everyone,
Sorry to trouble you all again but I'd like to find out more on the K3's 
6M performance as very little seems to be mentioned on the Elecraft website.
<SNIP>

Jeff Cochrane - VK4BOF