I am consummately pleased with my K3. I am astounded
with the raw
performance and dazzled with the features.
So am I.
The K3 is the first radio I have ever bought without some
silly engineering shortfall. The only things I see people
complaining about are specialized personal use or
application issues. It's impossible without years of field
refinement to get on the very top of the curve, but they are
already close and respond fast.
surpassing expectations masterfully. The fact they have
incorporated in
their development strategy a transparent and responsive
forum easily
accessible to the unqualified and very well qualified is
revolutionary
I've been involved with other groups and it is often to get
them to even consider major issues. It's so frustrating I
vowed to never again work with a radio manufacturer. For
example one manufacturer had an amplifier keying issue. The
radio spit out RF before it told the amplifier to turn on. I
knew it was happening because my homebrew amp has a
"hot-switch" sensor that prevents keying (relay transfer)
while RF is present, and I looked at it on a scope and could
see the issue. It took almost a week of actual work to get
them to look at the problem. The engineer responsible kept
saying he checked it and it was fine, but it turned out he
never did check. When they finally checked they fixed it,
but historically everything they did worked that way. It
worked that way with ALC issues that caused keyclicks, and
it worked that way with a dozen other bugs some of which
never were resolved.
All three major Japanese manufacturers are out of touch the
same way. It actually takes decades to address some very
simple problems.
Thankfully Elecraft has chosen a different approach.
and as yet unimplemented features. Frequently,
operational flexibility or
designer prerogative is misconstrued as a failure or a bug
and unimplemented
features thus far have a history of being implemented.
That's the problem I see. While there are shortfalls in
specialized areas, it is always an application specific and
design critical area like a noise blanker or IF port use.
What works well in one case might hurt other uses so they
have to find a compromise, and that takes time. They have to
learn all the different field applications, it can't really
be planned because planning would take so much time the
first radio would never leave the assembly line.
73 Tom
.
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