The K3 and the KX1-QRP!!!!

Hello all,

Well I headed west to my home Qth in Westport, Co.Mayo today where my Dad EI9JA and myself took a visit to Brendan EI6IZ.

I must say what a set up Brendan has he was showing us the Elecraft K3 and what a rig it is too.
That rig and an Acom1000 including a Long Periodic beam antenna made operation on the bands just simply amazing!

I am sold on this rig, its performance is unreal nothing I have ever experienced before, I put a call out on 40meters CW and Bang a pile up before me!
Brendan has done a nice little trick with the K3 and added a KRX3. For those of you that don’t already know The KRX3 adds a second receiver of equal specification to the primary receiver to the K3

Generally sub receivers are useful to help find out where the Dx station is listening in the pileup, to search for multipliers whilst ‘running’ in a contest or to monitor a second band in my case however it was such a useful tool for enhancing the ability to pull individual calls out of the large pileup I had build up. I can safely agree with Brendan on this that diversity holds a lot of promise for weak signal DXing where using 2 separate antennas can help reduce the impact of fading, QRM and noise, maybe radios manufactures in the future could look at putting this in as standard in their latest models.

So as the night went on my DXCC was increasing, Just before I left Brendan gave me his new toy which was another Elecraft but was a KX1 which is a QRP radio and I was amazed with its performance.
The Elecraft KX1 is a backpacker's dream: an ultra-light, multi-band CW station with internal battery and automatic antenna tuner.The KX1 includes a superhet receiver with variable-passbandRIT, S-meter, DDS VFO w/3 tuning rates, 3-digit display, memory keyer, battery voltage monitor, and a 1 to 4-watt transmitter with full QSK. The VFO covers the full 20, 30, 40 and 80 meter ham bands,with the KXB3080 installed, the rig’s DDS VFO allows reception from 1.0 to 16.5 MHz, which includes many popular shortwave broadcast bands. While signals far outside the ham bands are slightly attenuated, it is still possible to copy strong stations even in the commercial AM broadcast band. The KX1 transmits only in CW mode, but can receive SSB and AM signals, thanks to its variable-passband crystal filter.

Soon as we arrived home I connected this rig up to a 80 meter Dipole and made a few contacts on 80 meters first one SM6CW with report of 559 I was amazed at this achievement because Brendan has set this rig to only put out max 3-3.5 watts which I thought was by noways enough but it proved me wrong! I played with this radio for an hour or so and I worked a few Russians one German and one English station on 80 meters and even tried my luck on 30 meters and worked into France. 3 Watts QRP has just blown me away I'm shocked at this radio's performance.

Thanks to Brendan EI6IZ for giving me the experience of these radios.

73's