[Elecraft] What made you decide on purchasing an Elecraft transceiver?

[Jim Brown]

On 2/21/2011 10:35 PM, David Herring wrote:
> There were three things that pushed me over the top to buy a K3:

MOST IMPORTANT: I'm a serious contester, and I have close-in neighbors 
who are also serious contesters. Coexisting during a contest DEMANDS a 
receiver with great strong signal handling and great selectivity, and a 
transmitter that puts out as little trash as possible.  All but one of 
those close-in neighbors uses a K3, and the guy who doesn't gives the 
rest of us lots of trash.

Secondary reasons:

The cost of the K3, rigged out the way I want to use it, is half the 
cost of any rig that comes close to those "good neighbor" qualities.

The size and weight of the K3 is half that of other rigs. That gives me 
far more room on my operating desk, and makes it much easier (and 
cheaper) to drag my rig on an airplane. W0YK regularly drags two K3s as 
carry-ons to Aruba for contests, using Rose Kopp's very nice cases.

The excellent long-term performance of Elecraft in support of their 
products, and their responsiveness to user input in upgrading firmware 
to do more things, and do them in a more user-friendly way.

The user-friendliness of the operating controls. Virtually everything 
you need to do to operate the rig is on front panel knobs and buttons. 
Yes, there are lots of things on menus, but they are all set-up 
functions, not things you would do as part of operating the rig.  In 
addition, there are "soft keys" -- front panel buttons to which any 
menu-setting can be assigned. I use one of them to turn the internal 
speaker on and off. In two years of very active use, I haven't figured 
out anything I needed the second button to do.

A very nice array of built-in audio DSP functions, including EQ for both 
TX and RX, RF peak-limiting on transmit, and gated noise reduction. This 
yields excellent, very competitive and clean audio, and eliminates the 
need for external boxes to do these things.

Internal circuitry that can be set to take CW and PTT from the RS232 
port, without the need for external adapters or circuitry. Again, 
something less to carry, or to sit on the desk.

The ability to buy the functional options that I need, or can afford, 
and add others if and when I want to or can come up with the money to do 
so. I have the second RX in one of my three K3s, and plan to add it to 
another one. The last K3 I bought used from a fellow member of this 
list, without an antenna tuner. Since I mostly drive amps and have five 
Ten Tec tuners,  I rarely need the tuner.  It's great that there's a 
state of the art internal transverter for 2M, but I don't need one. it's 
great that there's an option to use the K3 as a full coverage RX, and I 
bought that option for one of my K3s.

Although it didn't enter into my purchasing decision because it wasn't 
announced at the time, I LOVE the P3. It is VERY useful for contesting, 
for DX-chasing, and for documenting and chasing RFI sources.

BTW -- my last FT1000MP is for sale, de-clicked, with roofing filter, 
and fully loaded with Inrad filters in every slot for both CW and SSB. I 
had been hanging onto it as a spare.  It's twice the size and weight of 
a K3. Contact me off-list if you're interested. :)

73, Jim K9YC