I wanted to give those who've ordered a K3 subreceiver a status update.
First, thanks for your patience; I realize the subreceiver has been
significantly delayed. (This is also pushing out the DVR. Lyle, KK7P
and I are collaborating on the PCBs and firmware for both units.)
When we release a product, it has to meet a number of criteria. Raw
performance by traditional measures is just one of these. Fortunately
the subreceiver has met our expectations in this regard, with dynamic
range virtually identical to that of the main.
But there are two other requirements that we must meet: excellent
mutual isolation between the main and receivers, and ease of
installation. Recently, we made the difficult decision that both must
be improved.
Isolation between the receivers is critical to usability. For example,
if you're listening to an extremely strong signal on one receiver, none
of it should leak into the other's I.F. After extensive testing, we
concluded that we were close, but needed more isolation.
Regarding installation: Someone with no experience should be able to
install or remove the subreceiver without much difficulty. The present
installation process is just a bit too complex once all other modules
and their associated cables are in place; the left side, chassis
stiffener, and several cables have to be removed. This has a secondary
effect, which is to make it very time-consuming to change crystal
filters on either receiver. We felt that we should improve this now,
before all fabrications were cast in stone.
Both isolation and installation can be improved with changes to our
original KRX3 PCB layout. I'm working on this now. Once the PC board
and shield designs are complete, we'll quickly build first articles and
run them through all of the tests again.
I'm confident that these improvements will allow the subreceiver to
live up to your expectations as well as ours. We'll post further
updates as we make progress.
(I know, I know -- "Stop rambling and get back to work!")
73,
Wayne
N6KR
---
http://www.elecraft.com
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