K3 Forced Repatriation

After one week investigation at local K3 holder's shack with Elecraft engineering support by e-mail, my K3's trouble is found as serious.

Following video clips are the comparison of bad K3 and normal K3 submitted to Elecraft engineer for their reference.

[Case-1]
my K3 upper, my friends' K3 lower.
receiving strong signal out of filter bandwidth.
First upper then lower and repeat.

[Case-2]
Same setup with receiving strong signal within thefilter bandwidth.
Swiching bad K3 and normal K3 vice versa.

I appreciate Elecraft enginner's patient support everyday.
But unfortunately, no improvement obserbed.
I deceided to send my K3 to the factory.

Marconi TRX1A

After long silence since Hamfair 2008 (Aug/2008), Marconi-Japan has finally announced their first products on 2009-03-08. That is a HF Transceiver Case Kit "Marconi TRX1A".
http://marconi-japan.com/default.aspx

It is Not a Transceiver kit but a Case kit.

It includes prefabricated case, knobs, fly-wheel drum, meter, connectors for RF and AF signals, power socket, cooling fan.
No PCB, electronic components for transceiver is included!

At the time of Hamfair2008, the guy at the Marconi booth explained that they will provide transceiver kit.
Since I have been interested in their presentation at Hamfair2008, I've been confirmed the progress of their preparation time to time and I saw that they have been reducing their plan guradually and finally they decided to sell only CASE KIT.
It's disappointing.

The sales price of the CASE is 88200JPY. Expensive!!
They are going to sell 30 sets only without having stock.

I've been confusing the company name with the famous telecommunication company of "Marconi plc" in UK that had been bought by Ericsson few years ago.
But Marconi-Japan seems no relation with that. It looks like a private workshop or personal company.

My K3 should go to hospital

Yesterday I took my K3 to a local friend Aki, JA1NLX who also has K3.
We made side by side comparison and found that my K3 is something like a compeletely different radio.
I left my K3 at Aki's home last night, according to Aki's report today, my K3 has too much distortion on all bands except 20m band.
He guess DSP board is suspicious and he suggested to contact Elecraft anyway.
So, I sent an e-mail to the Elecraft support today.

My K3 is very poor

I made apple to apple comparison between K3, FT2000 and K1.
The band is 40m and the time is eveing in Tokyo Japan.
Above shot is a band scope snap on 40m band when I made the test.
The biggest peak around 7330KHz is a Broadcast whose signal strength is +60dB over S9 on my FT2K s-meter.

And here is the comparison movie, 1st one is K3 vs K1, and the second one is K3 vs FT2K vs K1.




K3 is obviously very noisy and poor. FT2000 is much better than K3 and K1 is the best in three radio.
200-dollar raido beats 4000-dollar raido!
Is this only on my K3?

Graduation Ceremony

My son graduated from the high school today.