[Elecraft] Field Day tips

[Wayne Burdick]

Hi all,

Here are our annual tips for getting the most out of your Elecraft rig at field day:

1. QRP/BATTERY OPERATION: To conserve battery power, use 5.0 watts or less when running from a 12-V source, and 3.0 watts or less when running from an 8-10 V source (including internal batteries). To reduce supply current in receive mode, use headphones rather than the internal speaker, and if lighting conditions permit, turn off the LCD backlight. The KX3 automatically switches its 10-W power amplifier to a more efficient setting at reduced supply voltages. You can tell when this power-saving mode is in effect because of a decimal point after the 'W' in the power value (e.g., "5.0 W."). 

2. ANTENNA SPACING: If you're using more than one transmitter, try to keep the antennas as far apart as possible, and/or perpendicular to each other. If two stations unavoidably have their antennas in each other's near fields, you can dig into a pretty deep bag of tricks at the receive end, including: reducing preamp gain (or turning the preamp off), turning on the attenuator, narrowing the filter bandwidth, turning the noise blanker off, and (in the case of the KX3) setting MENU:RX SHFT to 8.0 rather than NOR. All of these settings are per-band.

3. OSCILLATOR ISOLATION (KX3-specific): The KX3, like other radios with a quadrature direct-conversion architecture, uses a VFO (local oscillator) running at or very close to the operating frequency. If you have another radio on the same band as the KX3, and the antennas are close together, the other radio may be able to hear the KX3's oscillator when they're both tuned to the same frequency. To prevent this, the KX3 includes an isolation amplifier that keeps the oscillator from radiating back through the mixer. Normally this amplifier is turned off to save about 15 mA of receive-mode current drain. To turn on the isolation amp, set MENU:RX ISO to ON. This has no effect on receive performance.

Above all, have fun!

73,
Wayne
N6KR