Saturday, August 11, 2012

Big winds but the right rig for reception

We've had very big winds here in Sydney over the past 24 hours. The half G5RV between tree and house broke at the centre insulator due to unexpectedly large tree movement. I've repaired it today and have been tuning around listening to all the stations in the contest today.

My favourite rig these days is the Elecraft KX3, which has always seemed very quiet and well behaved. Turns out it's just topped the chart at Sherwood labs.


Their ranking is by "dynamic range narrow spaced", which I don't fully understand but presumably means it behaves well when a strong signal is very close to the frequency you are listening to. The next rig on the ranking has a list price of $7,700 so that makes the KX3 a real bargain. It looks like it's uncommonly sensitive too from the table snippet above.

I find the KX3 a very quiet receiver, my only wish is that the tuning knob would spin freely but that's a minor quibble.

Congratulations Elecraft!

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