[Elecraft] [K3] The Way We Rank Receivers (long)

[Bill Frantz]

Before I bought my K3, I discussed the radio with someone in the 
booth at Radiofest, a small hamfest held near Monterey, CA. 
After I had learned a very little bit about the radio, I had my 
wife (KI6SLX), a retired QA engineer for Apple, discuss UI 
issues. When she said it seemed OK, I wrote a check.

I like Brian's idea of simulating contest conditions to test 
receivers. Such a simulation would need to be reproducible and 
good enough that it can't be gamed. For testing CW reception, 
perhaps a fixed set of signals modulated through a very linear 
SSB modulator would work. That could give at least 2KHz of 
signals for the receiver to handle.

The West Valley Amateur Radio Association field day operation 
sometimes has 3 signals active on one band (CW, digital, and 
SSB). We manage to get by running QRP with K3(S)s, KX3s, K2s and 
carefully placed antennas. For CQP, we managed to run two 
stations on a band at 100 watts with similar equipment and techniques.

73 Bill AE6JV

On 10/25/16 at 5:45 AM, alsopb at comcast.net (brian) wrote:

>I want to know how well a receiver is able to separate a weak 
>signal from strong signals 50-100 Hz away. It would be 
>interesting to speculate how such a measurement would be done. 
>Let the RX use whatever analog or digital tricks it can to 
>achieve the above.
>
>Your idea of simulating a contest with a hundreds of signal 
>injected at various random frequencies to gauge RX performance 
>has merit.
>
>Have you overlooked the MM, FD and DXpedition RX uses which in 
>fact push the dynamic range and mixing limits today?  There are 
>MM stations which operate two transmitters on the same band.

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