[Elecraft] Assistance with learning about an Elecraft S3 needed

[Jim Brown]

Great advice, Phil.

I'll add this. The Elecraft user interface is excellent, but it's 
DIFFERENT from the other mfrs for (at least) two important reasons.

1) The front panels of Elecraft rigs are MUCH smaller than most other 
rigs, so every button and knob has multiple functions, often depending 
on what mode you're operating. It's VERY important to understand how 
they're used.

2) The two guys who own the company and are the chief engineers are 
active hams, so they understand how hams use radios.

Some important things to study in the manual:

** How the menus are laid out.

** The long table describing menu settings.

** The available memories. There are a LOT, and which you'll want to use 
depend on how you operate.

** There are a couple of buttons on the front panel that you can assign 
menu functions to. Many of us plug in headphones on the rear panel. This 
  will mute the speaker, so we assign the MIC+SPKR ON/OFF toggle to one 
of those buttons.

It's not important to memorize this stuff, but it IS important to know 
where to find settings when you need them.

In general, all of the settings that we're likely to use while operating 
are on the top-level menu. The other settings are mostly for defining 
what modules are in the radio, what's plugged into it, and how we want 
to customize the radio to how we like to use it.

Another VERY important thing, if it's in the manual I may have missed it 
back in 2008 when I bought my first K3. ALWAYS turn the radio off using 
the front panel pushbutton. NEVER do it by killing DC power or pulling 
the plug. This is because Elecraft rigs save all of their settings when 
we turn them off; they'll come back with those settings when we turn 
them back on. But if you just kill power, nothing will be saved, so the 
radio will revert to the last time you turned it off with the button.

73, Jim K9YC

On 10/22/2024 1:47 PM, Phil Hystad via Elecraft wrote:
> My suggestions…
> 
> 1.  Familiarize yourself with elecraft.com<http://elecraft.com/> web site, focus on reference manuals and software pages.
> 2.  If your stack of manuals are out of date, consider downloading new copies.
> 3.  Download the K3 utility application and the P3 utility application.
> 4.  You will need a serial USB to Serial 9-pin for connecting computer to K3.  You should
> not need two different serial connections, one will do for K3 and P3.
> 5.  Study manuals to make sure you know how to cable everything up together.
> 6.  Run K3 application and check status of firmware and update if needed, ditto for P3.
> 
> After that, read the manual and learn all about the K3 and P3 and ask questions here on this
> forum if anything comes up.
> 
> 73, phil, K7PEH