I took my K3 to our club's Field Day operation. We have some serious contesters and DXers in the group, most of which are Yaecomwood owners. A couple have TenTec. Most of these guys have 5 band DXCC or are Honor Roll, etc. We can operate CW and SSB on the same band simultaneously and often do. Band conditions here in the NE were not very good. My K3 has the Heil Proset for head phones and boom mike. I thought you all might like to read my observations:
The first operator wanted me to set the receive equalizer flat, change the filter settings, etc to make the rig more suseptable to noise, QRM, etc because he said that without all the hash, intermod, etc, the bands sounded dead. He wanted the K3 to sound like what he was used to. While he might have been happy with the new settings when I listened to it, it was tiring.......meanwhile that guy barely gave up the use of the K3 for the entire weekend! His arguement was that without hearing a bunch of noise he couldn't tell if the spot he picked to run stations was quiet or was being QRMed by adjacent signals. Interesting. Two other CW ops sat down for a while, running 35+WPM and were very impressed with the smoothness of the rig. They both liked the filtering and the strength of the front end in the presence of other strong signals. EVERYONE cranked the RF gain to the max, even when I showed them that if they ran it about 2-3 O'clock and adjusted the audio gain instead they would have a more pleasant audio to listen to. Oh well, bad habits die hard. One comment I got was that this was the smoothest VOX of any rig the guy had operated. One problem we had was that the guys couldn't get the Ant 1 and Ant 2, and the several coax connectors straight in their minds. So occasionally after switching a coax I had to go over and see why there was no output. It was always operator error. The transmitting into no load did not cause any problems with the K3. Just the first time, I paniced because I thought that the finals had blown 2 hours into the operation. Fortunately it only took a few seconds to see what happened when someone mentioned they changed antennas. I did get a comment on the ease of figuring out the menu options as they were more intuitive than the operator was used to. Comments on the small size compared to the other rigs we had. Only one negative comment was the buttons are close together. We use band pass filters in the coax because of the 2 stations per band, but did not need those in line for the K3. Also, while I could hear some interference when I sat down behind a Kenwood 930 from another station, I never heard the K3. Every operator cranked the K3 output to max (110W output) could not get them to leave it at 100. But there were no problems observed. Every op had to fiddle with all the buttons....that's to be expected. Hey, we're hams. For the entire 24 hour period, I barely got to use my own rig. At one point there was a waiting list to sit down behind the mic or key. When I got home, it took a bit to get things back to normal for me because I had to figure out what everyone did. Of course I reloaded my configuration which speeded up that process. Bottom line: The rig performed flawlessly. Even with pretty hard use, everything went well. Thanks for a great product! John K2QY ______________________________________________________________ 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
