I used the KX3 in the North American QSO Party (CW) this weekend.  I was only able to put in a part-time Search and Pounce effort but the KX3 performed marvelously during the few hours I was on the air.

Before the Contest

Before the contest I had to interface the KX3 to N1MM.  I used the Elecraft USB cable to connect the KX3 to my computer.  The KX3 was immediately recognized by my computer which assigned it to COM 9.  I went to N1MM to setup the KX3 and discovered that N1MM can only interface to hardware on COM ports 1 to 8.  After a little investigation I discovered I could reassign the  KX3 to an un-used COM port in the range 1 to 8 using its properties dialog.  In my case I was able to  reassign the KX3 to COM port 2.  I was then was able to setup the KX3 with N1MM with no problems.

Next I had to setup the KX3.  First I connected an output from my USB Winkeyer to the external key input on the KX3.  I also had to go into the KX3 menus to tell the KX3 to treat the Key 2 input as a handkey since the external Winkey would be creating the dots and dashes.   Next I fired up the KX3 and used my external watt meter to set  the output power to 5 Watts since I was entering the QRP Single Operator, QRP category.

During the Contest

I started the contest on 15 meters because it seemed to have the highest concentration of activity early Saturday afternoon.  Once I had worked up and down the band a couple of times I switched to 20 meters and repeated the same process.  Finally, after I had finished on 20 meters I dropped down to 40 meters to try to work a few more stations before I had to quit.

The KX3 did a great job separating the strong signals under contest conditions.  Also the continuously variable passband and roofing filters did an exceptional job pulling weak stations out from between the major league contest stations.  I was also impressed by the performance of the KX3s internal antenna tuner.  The one thing I missed from my Icom 756 Pro III was the large color panadapter.  In the next few days I plan to use the I/Q outputs from the KX3 to create a panadapter display using HDSDR.  I’ll post my experiences once I get it working.

The highlight of the contest was working both Alaska and Hawaii with only 5 watts.

Here is a summary of my contest results:

Band   QSOs   Pts   Sec   Mt2

7         19        19       7      0
14         45        45    14      0
21         52        52    14      1
Total   116     116    35       1

Score : 4,176

73,

Fred