[Elecraft] Me and my K3 in the ARRL RTTY Roundup

[Jim Sheldon]

I decided to jump into the RTTY Roundup with both feet this year.  Of course, having just gotten me a K3 and P3 just before Christmas was a pretty big factor.  I'm a big fan of N3FJP's simple but powerful contest logging programs.  He produces a dedicated program for each contest, so you don't have to spend a month beforehand trying to set up all the MACRO's for the contest yourself as with some of the other available software.  He used a program written by K7RE to add some RTTY functionality to his general ham log and to the RTTY contests.  It uses the encoder/decoder engine from MMTTY and in spite of it's simplicity, it works pretty well with the K3, especially if you let COM1 talk to the log and COM2 do the PTT and FSK keying.  I built up W3YY's opto-isolator interface to give me the PTT and FSK drive from a com port and along with that came a CW key out as well.  RTS provides PTT and DTR provides CW keying.  When the PTT and FSK from the interface are connected to the K3 through the accessory connector, you don't need to worry about the menu item selecting DTR or RTS for PTT and / or KEY, just leave them OFF.  Works like a champ..

I'm not a serious contester, and I didn't operate the full time of the contest.  Stopped to watch the Seattle/New Orleans football game and went to bed after the game.  Started again this morning (Sunday) and kept at it on and off through the day.  At times, my QSO rate was actually up around 40 per hour which I think is better than I ever do even in a CW contest.  Wound up with just shy of 245 contacts and a fair amount of those were actually DX.  

Now, the main observation.  There were an awful lot of "Alligator" stations out there that don't have very good receivers.  If I could decode the signals, I called them.  Many of the weaker signals came right back to me, but an awful lot of the S9+ stations couldn't seem to hear anything (not just me, but a lot of stations).  Sure makes the K3 look better and better and BOY what a super tuning aid the P3 turned out to be.  I wound up relying on it to find those weaker stations between the "big guns" and worked 90 percent of them.  The power company is working on a serious line noise problem around here, and they haven't gotten it all located yet though and I had to put up with a lot of insulator arc noise as it was very windy all weekend.  I'll be glad when they get it all fixed (they promised me they wouldn't quit till the noise was gone after some prompting from the FCC).

I also HAD problems with my previous radios (including a K2) and another ham that lives about 5 blocks from me.  When he was on the same band and mode I was, he'd most times overload my front end bad enough I'd have to kick in the attenuator even when he was running 100 watts, not the KW he usually runs in contests that allow it.  He was operating the NAQP contest this weekend at the same time I was in the RTTY contest.  The only reason I even knew he was there was I came across him calling CQ.  I was able to copy weak cw signals on 20 meters within 1KHz of him (400 Hz 8pole filter was in line with the DSP set to 250Hz) with no noticeable degradation and I didn't notice any phase noise from him until I got within that 250 Hz DSP filter.  I suspect if he had his Alpha 9500 on running full bore I might not be able to get quite that close without noticing him, but unless his FT-1000MP is really noisy, the problems are gone.

Took a while to come up with the money to buy this K3, but it ain't leaving the shack except maybe to demo it at a hamfest like I used to do with the K2!!!

Jim - W0EB