[Elecraft] [K3] Setting RF gain & AGC correctly

[Bill Frantz]

Note that to change some of the AGC settings you must have Tech 
MD ON.

I tried these settings and went back to the stock settings. I 
think the reasons were:

I don't run pileups. I am mostly a S&P contester, and always in 
the pileup rather than working it for DX. (Just how many people 
need Santa Clara County CA?), so most of the improvements don't 
affect me very much.

When I'm listening to weak DX, the higher SLP keeps the 
occasional person who forgets to go into split mode (and the up 
police) from blasting out my eardrums.

My normal background noise on 20M is about S2. (It's about S5 on 
160M.) I think this means that I'm not getting AGC from the 
normal background. BTW, I don't know why my noise levels are so 
low living in suburbia. I always seem to be a couple of S units 
weaker than others I hear giving honest signal reports. In any 
case, I have enough sensitivity to get the band noise, and I can 
certainly hear a lot of stations which can't hear me.

When I run digital modes, I don't have to ride the RF gain to 
keep the audio signal to the computer below overload, a nice convenience.

I will have to try turning AGC off when using the Audio 
Frequency Peaking feature. With AGC on, it only seems to do a 
little compared with 50 or 100 HZ on the DSP filter. The DSP 
filter technique helps suppress slightly off frequency strong 
signals better too.

73 Bill AE6JV

On 4/9/16 at 12:44 AM, gm3sek at ifwtech.co.uk (Ian White) wrote:

>Following the release of FW v4.51, the consensus within the
>[K3-contesting] Yahoo group about the most important settings for DXing
>and contesting has been as follows.
>* AGC THR: increase to at least 8 (from default = 5) and preferably to
>12, and then take some time to become re-accustomed to the increased
>range of audio levels [2]. (Some users recommend as high as 14, if your
>ears can handle it.)
>
>* AGC SLP: decrease to 8 or even less (from default = 12). Lower SLP
>settings allow stronger signals to sound somewhat louder, and thus more
>realistic, but the range of variation will be partly determined by the
>THR setting already made; so always experiment with THR first, and with
>SLP afterwards.
>* AGC DCY = SOFT (not default=NOR). The User Manual claims that "The
>SOFT setting can reduce IMD caused by traditional AGC, and is especially
>useful in 'pileup' conditions, in some cases making it unnecessary to
>turn AGC off."

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