Friday, December 23, 2011

Elecraft KX3 is coming

A new ham radio is about to become available and like too many others, I'm waiting to find out the price and place my order. The Elecraft KX3 looks like a worthy successor to the popular Yaesu FT-817 for portable low power operation.


This radio covers 160-6 meters, power 10W, weighs 0.7kg, and can draw as little as 150mA on receive.

Elecraft have said that they plan to start taking orders in December with delivery in February. As I write, December is running out rapidly.

There is an active Google group with over a thousand members who are currently all asking if there's any updates yet. Actually, the conversation turned amusing yesterday with people joking that they'd received theirs yesterday and others offering second hand units for sale. Elecraft's Wayne Burdick N6KR is chipping in every now and then to politely answer every question but the big one.

I can't remember seeing so much excitement before the release of a ham radio product before. Merry Xmas Elecraft, now finish it off and we can all take a break.

Elecraft are so quaint. I love how they've configured their Apache web server so we can view directories.

Update

Just placed my order on 28-December.



2 comments:

PE4BAS, Bas said...

May be it's a successor for the Icom 703, but not for the FT817 with it's UHF/VHF capabilities. Besides that the interior could be state of the art, the outside looks like a TRX from long time ago (it's just what you like ??). 73, Bas

Peter Marks said...

Thanks Bas,

I'm not really interested in UHF/VHF and I agree the buttons are kind of ugly but the specs are impressive and I particularly like the low power consumption on receive.

73s

Peter