K3 SN # 4072, first impressions

[Chuck Shefflette]

I received kit #4072 on Thursday, opened the box and made sure it looked like it was all there. Unpacked and inventoried on Friday evening, started the assembly. I finished the assembly on Saturday, 20 March, and was quite happy when it ran through all its calibrations and was able to even receive WWV at 15 MHz with about 20' of wire stuck in the Ant1 jack. After fine adjusting the VCO with a real antenna I put it on the air. Even though I bought the 100W finals, so far I haven't used them except for calibration. I've had quite satisfactory QSOs with Sweden, Holland, Spain, and Scotland, all using 10W or less on SSB on 20, 17, and 15 meters with a 20/40M drooping dipole (well, almost an inverted vee) hanging at about 21 feet. The receiver is wonderful, the transmitter seems to work as nicely as any I've used, and the built-in tuner will probably tune a wet noodle! All in all, I'm very happy and look forward to many years with this rig!

73 from Chuck, AA3CS

[Don Cunningham]

Good job, Chuck.  You were a little quicker than me, as I got my K3 on
Friday morning and finished also Saturday evening, so I got an afternoon's
start on you, hi.  I too am very impressed with mine, but have yet to
actually put it on the antenna.  We had snow, ice and rain this weekend, and
I didn't want to try the antenna, hi.  We had a lot of thawing today, so I
should do the first contacts tomorrow.  Good luck with your "new adventure".
73,
Don, WB5HAK

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[Bill Henderson]

Hi

Mine,# 4006, started its journey through the post on 25th Feb and I picked it up from the ParcelForce depot in Perth on the 18th March. It took me about 2 1/2 days (at 9hrs/day) to stick the inards into the box.

The radilo is a fine piece of kit. It's hooked up to a PC via DXLabs' Commander. My next task is to get digimodes working  through Winwarbler . I've still to have a QSO.

The only thing that was missing from the kit (I probably lost it) was a "big" split washer for one of the blanking bolts that fill in the holes on the LHS where the 2m unit goes. I've raked though my junk box but I can't find one to fit. Later today I'll be raking through a friends junk box (Hi).

Have fun.

Bill
GM0VIT

[Chuck Shefflette]

Now with another evening in the books, I'm even more impressed. 20M was open to the west coast and I heard John - N6JW - working stations so I managed to get him. First call was with 25W, I was at his noise level so I bumped it up to 75W and we talked for a few minutes. He helped me through adjusting Mic gain and compression for a bit better results, thanks John! I didn't have any hardware issues with the build but the kit was short 1 set of instructions - they packed an extra set of KAT3 instructions with the KPA3 instead of the KPA3 instructions, fortunately I had downloaded a copy so I used them off the computer for the KPA3 install. I did not install the "standard" SO-239 antenna connectors, I swapped them out for BNCs which I much prefer. Too bad Elecraft does not offer that as an option, I would have elected to go that route. All in all, a fine radio and I'm sure I'll be learning about it daily!