[Elecraft] K3-Twin with Remoterig

[D Joyce]

Folks:

Following Eric's announcement last Friday, I setup a K3/10 as the "local" and the K3/100 as the "remote" along with a KPA-500, made up the one new E3c keying cable for the "remote / radio" site and have been trying things out since Monday night.  Still running things over my local LAN, but for the most part things work very slick.  I still have some things to configure properly and a few settings I don't fully understand.  Perhaps some of those who were able to work with the pre-Beta versions for a few weeks would explain a couple of things for me.

1.  It's not obvious how the KPA-500 fits into this control system.  In the previous (non-twin) approach, I used the KPA-500 Utility through the "free" Com1 channel of the RRC-1258 to turn the KPA-500 on / off and to monitor power and other performance parameters.  Is it still the intention to use the KPA Utility with this new Program mode "14" approach or is there another way?  Would appreciate some further details.

2. It's not clear how the audio and rf gain settings on the two K3s should be set.  Seems that the settings on the "remote" K3 override whatever has been set on the "local" K3.  So my settings at the moment are to have rf gain set at full CW for both main and sub on both K3s, to have AF gain on the "remote" K3 set at 12 o'clock for both main and sub and then use the audio controls on the "local" K3 for final admjustments.  BTW I'm running the two channels of  AF output from the "local" RRC to a pair of Timewave DSP-9+ units which feed separate speakers and the line outputs go to an old IBM PIII-600 running XP SP3 with two instances of MMTTY.

3.  The Microbit setup Mgr v1.10 ( I couldn't get v1.12 to load - a Windows problem) sets up four virtual Com ports (see pg 75 of the new rev A17 RRC manual) Com 0, 1, 2 and FSK.  I have the new ComFSK port working for FSK keying but I'm not sure how to configure for eg DX4Win to make use of Com 0, 1 & 2.  Further details would be helpful.

Thanks for your time.

73,  Doug  VE3MV