Our three KX3s performed flawlessly through eight hours of solid pounding. We made 148 contacts and probably influenced the purchase of at least a couple of KX3s in the process. The three KX3s were operating within a few of feet of each other but we experienced no interference issues we couldn't mitigate - except for fundamental overload when we put two of them on parallel vertical antennas only a few yards apart. Gosh...that's asking just a bit too much, even from Elecraft!
So Tony W1ZMB had to give up his 70 foot vertical for a 12 foot whip antenna on the flying bridge that was fed with 200 feet of coax. The KX3's ATU matched it 1:1 and whatever RF Tony had left by the time it got to the whip found its way west to California, south to Uruguay, and east to Europe. Ulrich N2DE made 67 contacts on his 80 foot wire vertical. Primarily DX. Ulrich doesn't believe in wasting paper; he used his CW Machine to autolog everything. I'll have to wait till he emails me an ADIF file to see exactly where his signals landed. I spent the day on 40 meters at the end of a 100' long wire. The KX3 and its ATU were very happy with the antenna and the 1200 ton counterpoise ;) My signal reports were mostly 559 to 599 with a pipeline to the south, right off the end of the long wire. No DX for me, except for Canada. Guess it was too early for 40M and we had to QRT at 8:00 p.m. EDT. We all noted with great pleasure how many KX3s we worked today. We also worked a number of K3s and K2s. We were hoping for at least one K1 and a KX1 to make a clean sweep of the product line but (as far as I know at this point) that didn't happen. My best "DX" was W4FKM in Bristol, TN. Claude had a homebrew 450 mw rig on 40 meters into an inverted V. The APF function and a very narrow bandwidth brought him out of the noise quite effectively. Condx were "OK" -not great but certainly not terrible. Wish we could have gone longer. At the end of the day, we all agreed that the KX3 is a real winner. It's moved the art and science of QRP ahead by a giant step. We accomplished our goals - We had a great deal of fun, got some publicity for a historic ship, and called attention to QRP by demonstrating that "it works." We probably could have made many more QSOs but only one (1) of us (Ulrich) is of that caliber. Tony and I are just common ragchewers and we admit to being sort of clumsy when it comes to keeping up with the hand-logging while trying to field the next call. The Begali "Adventure" prototypes, both iambic and mono, were a joy to use. We accumulated some additional input for Piero to consider as he brings the paddle forward toward production. One of the guest operators fell in love with both the KX3 and the Begali mono paddle. He was left handed and easily accomodated by swiveling the paddle from 45 degrees right to 45 degrees left and then retightening it. I thought I'd never get my rig back! Here's a video in which you can catch a glimpse of the Begali "Adventure" prototypes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b_cXOyiskU 73, Stan WB2LQF ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
