QST de N7GMT

Funk- — of or relating to radio.
Vergnügung — enjoyment, pleasure.
Funkvergnügung would therefore be something akin to operating pleasure.

Ahh — the K3/100 is here! All unpacked, assembled, (troubleshot, sent back, repaired, aligned, reshipped, and re-unpacked,) antennified, and energized.

Operating the K3 — Funkvergnügung!

The first weekend I had it (all healthy and whole) was the CQWW-SSB contest. This is 48 hours of pure DXer heaven — well, for those of us who don’t do CW well enough anyway. Stations from all over the world are on, trying to contact everyone else they can. I only had 58 Qs (QSOs: contacts) in the few hours I had to operate. Many were from Argentina and Brazil, with a few other South American contacts, a few Hawaii and Mexico stations, and a solid contact with a station in Spain!

The crazy thing, for me, was how wonderfully selective the K3 was, as compared to my IC-706MKIIG, and even my K2. Admittedly, I do have some nice roofing filters in the K3, but being able to tune up and down the band and have stations copyable despite the closeness to other stations … sometimes they were less than 1-kHz apart, but still workable, where all of my other radios want the more standard 2.5- to 3-kHz spacing between stations if you want to reliably understand what they’re saying.

Simply amazing.

I love my new K3. I had a chance to do some A/B testing with an IC-756 ProIII at another club-member’s home, and while there were strong similarities in capabilities between the radios, and even though his had some nice features — like the band-scope, being sexier to look at — I’ll keep my K3, and be very satisfied with it.

Thank you, Elecraft, for designing and producing such a nice radio. Not for everyone, admittedly, but I’m one happy camper — erm, ham-mer.

For those interested in the problem:
There was an intermittent solder short from the factory on one of the boards which caused one of the many micro-controllers to fail. Gary, on their tech support staff, was very good to work with, and helped me narrow the problem down over several days (email exchanges being what they are). Elecraft made good on it though, and did all the repair work. They even aligned the radio once everything was working. They want to make sure that all the parts are not just working, but working together in the system as well as they can make it work. That meant I had to be a little patient again, but that’s OK. This radio’s a joy to own and operate!