Those advisors - about a dozen focus group members - include several avid contesters. We made our 'druthers very well known during the requirements specification and design phases, and off and on through the rest of the project. Field input has always been important to Elecraft, and high-performance contesting definitely became a design point of the nascent K3. As the radio approached production release, contesters from the focus group were among the most vocal and vigorous field testers.

This article describes the radio from a contester's perspective and presents my initial impressions from participating in the field test. To meet NCJ's deadline, I had to submit this review before field testing actually ended. The QRP test radio lacked the 100W power amplifier, but it drove an Alpha 87A to 250-600W depending on the band. The test unit also had no sub-receiver or noise blanker. The lack of a noise blanker presented a problem at times, but Elecraft has promised an NB for initial-production radios.

Many software features were in preliminary form or not yet implemented, so this is, of necessity, just a first look. In some cases I refer to promised features in the present tense because Elecraft has committed to include them. Others I explicitly note as futures. Because this is a software-defined radio (SDR), the performance and feature set of production units may vary from what I report. Check back here and elsewhere in the coming months for updated comments and for lab test results on production units.

Releasing the K3 into the Amateur Radio marketplace will not be the end of the story. Elecraft plans a series of new features and improvements over the coming years, and you'll be able to download them to the radio in minutes via the Internet and your PC. There is plenty of unused program memory, so Elecraft will not be limited in the scope of future improvements.

Design

Not at all an upgraded K2, the K3 is an entirely new radio and a new manufacturing concept. Whereas the K2 is an inexpensive, digitally-controlled, analog radio in kit form, the K3 is a mid-priced, factory-built digital radio with some interesting analog stages. While the K2 was born out of the QRP movement and later acquired an add-on 100W amplifier and digital signal processing (DSP), Elecraft is introducing the K3 with a full complement of bells and whistles. Although it is available as a semi-kit - a box of manufactured boards and cabinetry that the purchaser can assemble without need of a soldering iron - the factory-built and factory-aligned boards assure that every radio will have identical performance and reliability expectations. The only tools required are a dummy load, Philips screwdriver and digital multi-meter.

Why did Elecraft deviate so radically from its kit-building roots? Some fo the faithful were disappointed to learn that their soldering irons would sit idle during K3 assembly. Elecraft explains convincingly that its design goals were unachievable without using specialized components available only as surface-mount devices (SMD). The K3 uses enough SMDs (60%) that construction by most amateurs would be impractical.

For the complete version of this article as published in the NCJ, view the pdf version.