[Elecraft] Considering a K3

[Fred Jensen]

David,

If you have enough hams setting up and using enough of anything, 
eventually they will do everything wrong. :-))

So far, all the "bad transmit audio" threads on this list that I can 
remember were problems external to the K3, and to the best of my 
knowledge, Elecraft has done nothing to correct "it" because there 
hasn't been anything to correct.

A good friend [K9YC] who made his living in the professional audio 
business suggested some settings on the TX equalizer for me.  I set them 
up, and in the small number of SSB contests I enter I never fail to get 
at least one unsolicited, "Great audio" comment, usually more than one. 
  I use a Heil headset with the electret mic that I got from Elecraft.

There is a huge amount of great advice from the Elecraft user community 
on this list but just like everything else in life, everyones' mileage 
will vary and one person's "horrible thumping on QSK" is not a problem 
for others [like me, QSK works just fine for me, better than any full 
break-in radio I've ever used].

You will see comments that the *only* way to get the K3 AGC to work 
right is to "ride the RF gain."  It works for that person but not so for 
everyone, I never touch the RF gain and, once I got the AGC parameters 
set, I've never needed to.  You will find occasional posts about "awful" 
hiss from the K3.  Possibly for him but again, not a problem with K3/100 
#642 and never has been.

I've learned to filter the list some, pejorative adjectives [horrible, 
awful, terrible, and the like] are one clue that I probably don't need 
to spend a lot of time on this one.  You will also begin to identify 
those who actually know the answers and you can give them more weight. 
Periodically, Don [W3FPR] will patiently explain how to adjust the line 
level for AFSK RTTY ... it's always the same simple explanation. :-)

You will be hard pressed to find customer service anywhere else like we 
all get from Elecraft.  I was born with no color vision and when I got 
the P3, I couldn't see weaker signals in the color waterfall, no 
contrast with the background.  I mentioned it in a post.  The next P3 FW 
update from Alan included a monochrome option in the menu.

There are several good transceivers out there.  The K3 is one of them.

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
- www.cqp.org

On 4/5/2014 9:58 AM, David Cole wrote:

> In my wanderings across the net looking for data on the K3, saw
> reference to bad audio on transmit from the K3, these were 2 year old
> posts. Was there an issue, or was it user setup, and if an issue, did
> Elecraft correct it?  I saw some changes were made two the transmit
> audio, was this done to correct the issue, if there was an issue.