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!

OK, so recently I did the nigh-unthinkable: I bought an iPod.

I know, I know.

But it still has the best user experience of all the (stock*) MP3 players out there.

(*I hear you can put Linux on some of them and it can make ‘em that much better, but I’m not there yet.)

Sure, iTunes is a real pain for anyone with more than six braincells—well, more than six computer-savvy braincells. Sure, it uses an internal, non-user-replaceable battery. No, you can’t just mount it as a flash-drive and drop music on it and have it access them. (You can just use it as storage, but that seems like a bit of a waste of an 8GB iPod nano, which is what I got.)

But it’s tiny. And you can watch movies on it. Yes, the screen is small, and pixels are so small as to be nigh undetectable by the unaided human eye, but it’s pretty cool to be stuck somewhere, waiting for someone to show up so you can do whatever it is you’re there waiting for them for, and just whip out the ol’ iPod and watch the next ten minutes of whatever it was you were watching when life interrupted.

I got it right before taking off for the weekend with my boys for a fathers-and-sons outing …

(note to self, write about that, too)

… and only had time to throw on a few albums before heading out to the western Utah desert. (They don’t call it a desert for nothing, let me tell you.) I played with it a little while out there and a little when we got back before my Sweetie noticed and asked, “When did you get an iPod?”

I eventually had to let her try it out. She had it in her possession for all of—and I’m not making this up—exactly four seconds before asking “So, when are you going to get one?” Yeah, exactly.

So either I have an über-cool new toy, or I’ve finally sold out to the iPod generation. The jury is still out.

(Did I mention I got a “reconditioned” one, so it was, like, 30% off?  Does that make me less of a sell-out?)