[Elecraft] Mush and Manufacturers

[William Hein]

One of the reasons I switched allegiance from Yaesu and Ten-Tec (I was a dedicated FT-1000D user for ten years and then an early and initially enthusiastic Orion and Orion II user but lost interest when it became obvious that both Yaesu and TT could care less about feedback from their users and what features they would like to have added to the rigs' software and hardware) to Elecraft was the participation of the company principals and staff in the user forums.  I see that on fine display here today.  It sounds like a real problem has surfaced and the collective brainpower of the K3 community (manufacturer and users) is drilling down to a solution.

What other manufacturer would encourage users to break out their soldering irons and experimentally add capacitance to circuit?  It dinged my ham budget to unload my Orions (4 Orion IIs) in order to switch to K3 but I'm happy I did (will be adding a second K3 to my station for SO2R shortly).  The K3 will be constantly improved (anyone checked out the new master-slave capability?  WOW  I was bugging TT to add this to the Orion II 7 years ago to no avail) while the Orion's software/hardware remains static and Yaesu succeeds mostly in adding knobs and weight to their rigs (admittedly the FT-5000 is better than the train wreck FT-9000).

Regarding the Mush discussion, I like the idea of decoupling hardware RF Gain and DSP Gain.  This could be a interesting feature beyond controlling weak signal pileup jumbles.  I learned with the Orion that one has to watch signal level into the DSP circuitry carefully. 

73
Bill

-----
William Hein, AA7XT
(ex-AA4XT, NT1Y, AA6TT, KC6EDP)

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