[Elecraft] Are you satisfied with your K3?

[Fred Smith]

I know nothing about future plans but I bet there may very well be a
"remote" KAT500 down the road. But this great product( love mine so far)
calls out for that version at some point in time........You could even do it
right now with a little work on your own and not really that hard if "you
really want it now" like they say on TV.

If memory serves me right I think someone on the reflector is/or has done
one already.

73,
Fred/N0AZZ

-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Bayard Coolidge
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2012 9:21 AM
To: Elecraft
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Are you satisfied with your K3?

Like many others here, I've been licensed for a long time (close to 45
years), and have had many decent rigs, albeit not necessarily high-end
multi-kilobuck ones. Most recently, I was using an Icom IC-746Pro.

Clearly, the K3 can run circles around the '746Pro in virtually all
respects, and I knew that before I bought my kit late this summer. But,
there is one feature that is "missing" (solely in my opinion) - the
capability to control an external/remote tuner in the same sort of way that
I could control my LDG IT-100 from the '746Pro.

My antenna configuration is a bit weird - I'm on a small south Florida home
lot, with 24kV power lines running parallel to both the back lot line and
one (the east) side lot line, and the XYL wants to maintain "curb appeal".
I installed a 20m quarter wave vertical (~16.5 ft high) near the wooden
fence on the west side and then ran 40ft of wire northward to a tree branch,
and installed some counterpoise wires. Between January and June, I used the
IT-100 at the base of the vertical at the feed point, and controlled it from
the 'Pro using the AH-4 protocol over some 4 conductor wire. Band changes
were virtually instantaneous, and I was able to work a surprising amount of
DX.

With the K3, I'm having to tune the antenna system (antenna plus about 50
feet of RG8X) at the rig in the shack.
I'm a bit squeamish about this - it seems to be working OK, the internal
tuner in the K3 is nice and fast, but I still wonder how efficient it is
compared to Pro/IT-100 configuration. Unfortunately, I'm not in a position
to gather definitive data to support or refute my qualms, but my sense is
that, on some frequencies, there's a really nasty looking impedance
presented at the back of the rig.

I realize that Wayne and the rest of the design crew had to make some
engineering design decisions, but I'm thinking it would be real interesting
if they could concoct a solution entailing replacing the KAT3 with some sort
of small interface/controller, which would then "talk" to a remote version
of the KAT3 tuner itself over a cable, in the same vein as (but not
necessarily using) the AH-4 hardware/signaling protocol. This way, I could
hit the 'ATU TUNE'
button, which would drop the K3/100 to low power, have the tuner do its
thing but at the antenna feed point, and then return the rig to full power
and ready to operate. Yes, I know that they have bigger fish to fry at this
point!

Overall, though, I'm delighted with my K3/100 and am still learning about
all of its features and how best to use them.


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