Lyle:
Being a 99.5% CW op, I seldom (ever) operate fone... heck, I can
seldom FIND the mic for that matter. But this afternoon, while
waiting for Wayne to respond to a couple questions I had submitted to
him, I cranked the K3 up to the (shudder) fone band on 20M, just to
see if I cold get it to operate on fone, and to see how well the VOX worked.
I must say that one of the reasons I have always HATED operating fone
in VOX mode in the past was the constant clicking of T-R relays and
having to almost shout into the mic in order to overcome the ANTI VOX
gain required by many of the (older) rig's I'd used in the past. I
also hated it when the mic would trip repeatedly as a result of the
audio being picked up by the mic from the speaker... I've never(!)
had/used a rig which had what I considered to be decent ANTI VOX.
Well... NOW I HAVE!
Golly... I am absolutely amazed at what you have done with the K3's
DSP to allow for such absolutely CLEAN VOX operation. I was
expecting to have to diddle with the VOX GAIN initially, to set it
for my voice level, and THEN, to have to FIGHT with the ANTI VOX in
order to compensate for the amount of VOX GAIN I'd chosen.
That never happened...! In my Field Test K3, the VOX GAIN had been
defaulted to a value of 30 (if I recall) and the ANTI VOX to 100. So
I started out using those values. Using a Heil hand mic intended for
an Icom radio, I found that I was able to crank the VOX GAIN back to
about 10-15 and still had more than ample VOX sensitivity. Then, to
my absolute amazement, I found that I could crank the ANTI VOX level
all the way down to 0 (zero) and I STILL could not force the speaker
audio to 'falsely' trip the VOX...!!! And I tried pretty hard... I
even held the mic up in front of the speaker, about 2" away and still
it was stable.
I then cranked the VOX DELAY down to 200 mS (0.2S) and worked a
station in Croatia with what was almost syllabic VOX... being able to
listen between even short pauses in speaking... not quite between
words (I didn't want to press my luck THIS time), but it sure is sweet!
I'm still a died-in-the-wool CW op, but I must say that what I've
seen so far from your efforts with the K3 DSP on the SSB features
wouldn't take much to have me operating fone a LOT more frequently.
And Wayne, I KNOW you're listening too... the latest changes you've
made to the K3's firmware have really made the QSK sweet... quiet and
FAST. I now consider it to be as good as that of my TS-930S, which I
always felt had some of the very best QSK ever offered in an HF
rig... bar none.
Field Testing this rig is just getting funner and funner as the days go on.
73,
Tom N0SS K3 #0008
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