[Elecraft] Firmware development

[Jim Brown]

Tim,

It's important to realize the the basic K3 was designed in 2007 with 
2007 parts. It should be obvious that technology has advanced by several 
orders of magnitude since then (remember Moore's Law?. That fundamental 
limitation is a major reason why features that are on lots of wish lists 
aren't implemented, and it's a major reason why there's a K4.

Elecraft is a small company, so they can't afford to build new models as 
often as the bigger companies, but the K3 was a very innovative product 
that upped the ante for what a great radio should be. For example, it 
took ten years for Flex to incorporate the keying waveshaping that the 
K3 introduced in 2008, and, as far as I know, they're the only mfr to 
have done so (maybe ANAN?). All the other mfrs are using very primitive 
(and very clicky) simple RC time constants dating back 70 years! 
Elecraft also did some very slick stuff to make their phase noise much 
lower than most radios, again, back in that 2007 design.

And they may be the only mfr to make their radios modular, so we can buy 
as much radio as we need, and so that some features can be upgraded by 
buying upgraded modules. If you want a new feature or performance 
improvement on a JA radio, you have to buy a new radio.It took Yaesu 
three generations of their then flagship FT1000-series rigs to fix their 
really awful clicks, and their current flagship, the FTDX5000 debuted 
with the worst clicks of any of its competitors. They didn't provide a 
firmware fix to make the clicks half as bad until I embarrassed them 
with my report summarizing ARRL Lab tests; by then the radio was 4-5 
years old!

73, Jim K9YC

On 11/23/2020 10:13 PM, Tim Tucker wrote:
> But
> one thing that the last few years has shown is that Elecraft does not have
> a great track record of developing new features or technologies into their
> existing transceiver products.  They release updates and patches for
> various issues, and certainly did release new features early on for the K3,
> but a lot of the ideas the community suggested went unanswered. I
> understand why this is, and hope that it will change with the K4, but
> ultimately the K3, KX3, and KX2 are largely the same product that they have
> been for the last several years.