[Elecraft] K2 still a viable portable contest station?

Paul Gacek w6png at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 27 17:32:13 EST 2019


Thanks all for your perspectives and the info on the audio chain is very informative and hadn’t really thought of that one. Simplistically I thought the audio on all three would be similar but now I know.

I have a K2/100 I built and maybe like all K2 owners have a fondness for it and would like to see it used more.

I’m sitting in Houston airport waiting for my flight to Costa Rica with two KX3/PX3 combos which we will use for this contest but its a bundle of gear to tire together especially when you add laptops, KXPA100 and my home brew SO2R box that all in all makes the K2/100 attractive albeit minus the panadpter.

Having a panadpter does help in a contest and retrofitting one to a K2 either via an IF tap or an external SDRPlay type solution probably enters the comparison at some level.

Keep the comments coming!

Paul Gacek
W6PNG/M0SNA
www.nomadic.blog

> On Feb 27, 2019, at 2:19 PM, Jim Brown <jim at audiosystemsgroup.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 2/27/2019 5:33 AM, Ignacy wrote:
>> K3 has an excellent speech processor with equalization. K2 has compressor
>> and sounds OK but not dramatic with good microphone. IMHO KX3 processor is
>> not too efficient and even below K2. But KX3 has an equalizer allowing any
>> mic to sound good.
> 
> Yes. The K2 is compromised in several ways on SSB. First, the audio stage is low on gain, so a mic doesn't hit the peak limiter hard enough to do much. Second, the audio chain has a flat response, so low frequency components of the voice waste transmitter power. I did a mod for mine, which W3FPR knows about, that provides some low end rolloff and increases mic gain by about 6dB. That helped, but it's nowhere near what the K3 and KX3 are capable of.
> 
> Second, the narrow settings of the receive filter are produced by stagger-tuning of the multi-stage CW filter, and their combined response looks like a side view of the Rocky Mountains, so the accompanying phase shift distorts the RX audio enough that using the narrow settings often degrades speech intelligibility (that is, it makes voices HARDER to understand).
> 
> 73, Jim K9YC
> 
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