I think that most are looking for something the K3 WRTC numbers are not telling. I rather doubt that people went out and bought them for the WRTC. With those kinds of numbers, the market had already made its decision a long time ago.
I know some who borrowed K3 and/or P3 for the contest. That means those skilled operators had other rigs but *wanted* the K3/P3. The rest (vast majority) already owned them. In those cases, it's the rig they bought for themselves, or they had multiple rigs and *wanted* the K3/P3 for the WRTC. As a piece of market research, that list should be (and is) terrifying to other manufacturers. Usually when a single brand/model has such a huge penetration of top echelon operators, the competition will take decades to change minds in the market. The only comparable historical dominance of this sort is Collins Radio, which eventually lost out to Yakencom because the Collins transistor offerings were ridiculously expensive. The Yakencom radio which pushed up market penetration among contesters was the FT1000MP. Interestingly, among all I know who do/did have MP's for contesting and upgraded, 90+ percent of those went to K3's. As to the technical advantages of the K3, most of my own K3's observed advantages probably would not show up using the WRTC antenna package. That is after all an intentional "little pistol" setup. The well known clean performance of K3's in multi- and close station immunity is very useful there, but some newer Yakencom are quite good there as well. If you run a five element 40m wide spaced quad on a 190 foot catenary trained on Europe, and place an MP side-by-side with a K3, the enormous difference shows immediately. Even if Yakencom comes out with an intermediate price unit with somewhat better performance there, The K3 has a better version of the VHS over Betamax advantage, plus the huge advantage of the proven, now trusted Elecraft responsiveness to customer issues. A case can be made that the latter was the biggest K3 competitive advantage. It should be obvious and without argument that the K3 far and away has THE market penetration among serious contesters, regardless of how one might explain it. That is true even without the WRTC numbers, just not so visible and in-your-face obvious. 73, Guy K2AV PS, I got my taste for KoolAid as a kid, long before I was interested in any kind of radios. The inference that all KoolAid is spiked with Cyanide is an insult to the memory of my registered nurse mother, who would do just about anything to keep her kids hydrated out in the hot New Mexico desert sun, sometimes including her own variety of KoolAid made from scratch. Jim Jones was an idiot and ruined a perfectly good concept. Elecraft KoolAid (sometimes known as liquid mojo) is good stuff and perfectly safe for human consumption :>) ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
