[Elecraft] Hamfest Demo - 2 K3's on the same table

[Jim Sheldon]

We put on a demo at the KS State ARRL Convention yesterday (Sunday the 21st).  N3ARU and I had our K3/P3 combo's set up on the same table and hooked up to antennas outside the building.  My antenna was a PAC-12 vertical and his was made out of a Hamstick mounted on a tripod.  They were spaced approximately 40 feet apart and his was around the corner from mine, placing a small part of the concrete and steel building between the two.

We were both running 100 watts output with me on CW about 14.040 and N3ARU was on SSB around 14.250.  I worked KO1U in Haverhill, MA during one demo while N3ARU was working another station on SSB.  There was absolutely no observed interference between the 2 K3's.  You could see my CW moving the baseline on his P3 and his SSB moving mine.  That was as expected since the IF takeoff point for the P3 is before any serious filtering anyway so it should show up.  Neither K3 hit us with the RFI indicator even with the antennas that close.  I believe having that corner of the concrete building between them was the reason for that.

Word got out pretty quickly and a while later we had a number of people around the table asking for further info.  Set it up again - Dwight tuned in a medium weak SSB signal on his radio and I tuned around on the CW portion of 20 meters.  I heard ES1TU (Adu in Estonia) calling CQ DX on 14.007 so I called him.  Everyone was listening to Dwight's radio copying the weak SSB signal and never noticed I was working Adu on CW on the same band.  The guys that were watching me were favorably impressed when ES1TU came back to me.  He gave me only a 449, and he was only 559.  I had to have the noise blanker on and set pretty aggressively as the ceiling was full of mercury vapor lights!  Dwight left his off for the demo so we didn't get any intermod caused by the NB.

All in all, it was a very good demonstration of the K3's capability to handle very strong, close-in signals.

The other thing that really got attention was the RTTY and PSK-31 demonstrations using the CW paddles.  Made a few contacts on RTTY in the SARTG contest while it was running.  There were a number of K3 owners that stopped by to say hello and sometimes interject their experiences with the K3.  Several notables were Nate, N0NB and Jim AC0E.  Lee, K0WA also stopped by and I had to wipe the drool off the P3 (Just kidding Lee).  There were a few others that I only just met and I apologize for not remembering their calls here.  

Lisa had sent me a big packet of literature to hand out and there are only a very small handful left so I'd call it a successful trip for sure.  A number of the people that left with the info packets mentioned that they had been considering the K3 for a while, but were sure glad to be able to get a good demo and some hands-on time.

Had one Kenwood TS-5000 owner loudly proclaiming that his rig was better until the demo where I worked ES1TU while the weak SSB qso was being copied on the other K3.  Don'cha just love it when a plan comes together?

Jim - W0EB
Park City, KS
K3 #5027
P3 #983