Tim,
It's important to realize the the basic K3 was designed in 2007 with
2007 parts. It should be obvious that technology has advanced by several
orders of magnitude since then (remember Moore's Law?. That fundamental
limitation is a major reason why features that are on lots of wish lists
aren't implemented, and it's a major reason why there's a K4.
Elecraft is a small company, so they can't afford to build new models as
often as the bigger companies, but the K3 was a very innovative product
that upped the ante for what a great radio should be. For example, it
took ten years for Flex to incorporate the keying waveshaping that the
K3 introduced in 2008, and, as far as I know, they're the only mfr to
have done so (maybe ANAN?). All the other mfrs are using very primitive
(and very clicky) simple RC time constants dating back 70 years!
Elecraft also did some very slick stuff to make their phase noise much
lower than most radios, again, back in that 2007 design.
And they may be the only mfr to make their radios modular, so we can buy
as much radio as we need, and so that some features can be upgraded by
buying upgraded modules. If you want a new feature or performance
improvement on a JA radio, you have to buy a new radio.It took Yaesu
three generations of their then flagship FT1000-series rigs to fix their
really awful clicks, and their current flagship, the FTDX5000 debuted
with the worst clicks of any of its competitors. They didn't provide a
firmware fix to make the clicks half as bad until I embarrassed them
with my report summarizing ARRL Lab tests; by then the radio was 4-5
years old!
73, Jim K9YC
On 11/23/2020 10:13 PM, Tim Tucker wrote:
But
one thing that the last few years has shown is that Elecraft does not have
a great track record of developing new features or technologies into their
existing transceiver products. They release updates and patches for
various issues, and certainly did release new features early on for the K3,
but a lot of the ideas the community suggested went unanswered. I
understand why this is, and hope that it will change with the K4, but
ultimately the K3, KX3, and KX2 are largely the same product that they have
been for the last several years.
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