Hi Everyone,
In hanging around the K3 booth in Dayton this year (some would say I was
'lurking' around the booth) I overheard several K3 prospective owners
pressing Wayne on the absence of dedicated bandswitches and bandstacking
registers.
Having been a user of Icom and Ten Tec gear for many years, I too admit
that this was one of my reservations when first considering my K3
purchase over a year ago.
Now after almost four months of K3 use, I wanted to past a comment
directed at those considering a K3 who believe that this issue may be a
deal breaker.
IMO it is not.
It takes a bit of time and study to adapt to this approach of Elecraft's
UI, but the K3 has some remarkable and flexible alternatives.
Over the years I have never had much use for transceiver memories as
implemented by most JA manufacturers, but he K3' approach to memories
and their flexibility is awesome once you master them. Between general
memories, memories assignable to the number keys and the 'within band'
memories you can quickly replicate something very similar to dedicated
bandswitches. One of the best tutorials on this is found on the K3 Wiki
website. If you have not discovered it you should look it up.
Having now programed the K3's number keys as memories for a portion of
each band and the 'within band' memories (M1-M4) to another portion of
the same band, I have something approaching dedicated bandswitches. It
took a while to discover how to do this but now changing bands is second
nature. I almost never use the K3 up and down bandswitch any more, The
programmable memories are just that much quicker.
I had a talk with Wayne about this at Dayton. He asked if I would
consider sharing my personal comments on the reflector. Thus my post here.
If at some time in the future when the K3 wish list has shrunken down,
should Elecraft develop an outboard combination keypad/bandswitch along
the lines of what Icom offered for the venerable IC-751A way back, I'm
sure some of us would welcome it but until then I find the use of
programmed memories for bandswitching to be just fine.
My $.02
YMMV
73 de N1LQ-Dave
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