6700 vs Hilberling vs K3 vs K3S

KY6LA_Howard

Sitting in Heathrow as am on my way back to the USA just now after ny speaking tour at Friedrichshafen and the Czech Republic. I spent last week in the Czech Republic setting up SDRs, giving talks, visiting contest stations and drinking a heck of a lot of Suoerb ****. The Czech were rather marvelous hosts who could do nough for both myself and fellow traveller Ben N6MUF. Pavel OK1MY has a $18k Hilberling, 3 K-3's, IC-7800 and now a 6700 we ran a lot of ABC tests. Pavel has a 150' tower with 3 stacked full sized MonstIR We also ran Stu's K6TU Alpha IPad App vs the Hilberling. Here is a shot I took yesterday afternoon . The Hilberling is on the left, the 6700 obviously in the foreground, the k3's are under the monitors and the 7800 is behind the monitor He has several 4KW and an 8KW amp Like me, we never turned on the 7800. It has been totally surpassed by every other radio in the shack. But we did test the HILBERLING vs K3S vs 6700 on ABCD switches. The K3 without the upgrade board was not competitive. With the upgrade it was very competitive with the Hilberling. On SSB all 3 were very close on strong signals but the Flex won easily on extremely weak signals as it could pull stuff out of the noise that the other 2 could barely do. On CW,,,,absolutely NO Contest. The 6700 won hands down because it had such excellent brick wall filters. BTW these are Pavels comments not mine. Stu's ipad app alpha blew everyone away while we sat out in the patio working DX. The results were strictly aural but Pavel will be doing detailed measurements in the near future. Pavel is a very happy camper with his new 6700

Bill -VA3WTB

Howard, What does he think of the Maestro? 

KY6LA_Howard

He ordered one. But like all of us, we shall see what Flex actually delivers.

Mike va3mw

I agree on stu's app. I played with it yesterday.

Ken - NM9P

About what I would have expected. did you need to fish your key out of the lake in order to test CW?
But three MonstIR's?
Wow! I guess you will be ordering two more to keep up? Ha ha.

Have a safe trip back, Howard.

KY6LA_Howard

Better than fishing my key out of the lake I brought along a very experienced CW DXpeditioner Ben N6MUF as my "Roadie" and CW operator.

W9OY

How did the speaking engagements go? Interesting post

Bob-N4HY

Great work Howard and beautifully told.

Bob-N4HY

Please give Ben my best and if you can, tell him our mutual friend Kathy Boyd is pushing for us to have an eyeball QSO.

Walt - KZ1F

Where those K3S transceivers stock, off the shelf?

Bill -VA3WTB

And was the Flex stock off the shelf?

SteveJ

He should probably trade the 7800 on the 7851.  I understand it is one excellent radio.  Better than the 7800 for sure and probably gives the 6700 a run for it's money.

Walt - KZ1F

A stock K3S does not come with all the filters that are available as optional extras. The Flex does. Comparing a stock K3S to a stock Flex is not a valid comparison unless, of course, you want a certain outcome.

W9OY

Funny post Walt, made me giggle

73  W9OY

DH2ID

Howard, I heard your speech at Friedrichshafen and I liked it a lot. As had a lot of time and was there very early I sat down with the Hilberling at their booth and played a bit with it. Boy, am I glad for my Flex-6500... I found the Hilberling quite a clunky -although beautiful - piece of old fashioned hardware. I quite innocently asked them if they knew about the new SDRs and if they were building one...I did the same thing to ICOM, naughty me....;-) 73, Alex DH2ID

Walt - KZ1F

Lee? Do I want to ask?

Jay Nation

I think you just did. 
73, Jay - NO5J

W9OY

Well lemme see the guy has about $40,000+ of radios sitting on his desk.  He has 3 Monstirs plus what looks like an 80M beam on a 150 foot tower.  He has probably $40,000 worth of amplifiers.  He has far more invested in Elecraft than Flex which would tend to bias toward Elecraft.  And you're wondering if the guy cheaped out on a couple hundred dollars worth of Elecraft filters and nick nacks.  I just find that hilarious.  

I recently posted in a CW forum I thought it was better to learn code on a keyer than a strait key.  A guy posted back and said no a strait key is better because if we ever experienced a EPM the keyer would be fried...   I also found this hilarious.  Maybe you and my CW poster are neighbors.

KY6LA_Howard

Actually we borrowed a 7851 from HRO to test at NX6T Contest station just before Dayton.

Nobody was particularly impressed with it.....they liked the K3's better for contesting.
We figured if we actually bought it, it would end up on shelf with the 7800 totally unused.

KY6LA_Howard

FINALLY Back in the USA after 6 weeks..

Speaking engagements went rather well. 

I must say that the SDR field is changing so rapidly that I was making last minute changes before each and every speech.

I introduced the concept of the Evolution of 4 Generations of SDR at Friedrichshafen,  Almost immediately virtually every other speaker at the SDR Academy began using my generational definitions in their presentations.  Several indicated that they would use the generational nomenclature in their papers to be published by DARC.   The SDR Academy will soon be available on YouTube once DARC finishes editing and all the papers will be published by DARC once peer review is completed.  I am under a bit of a time crunch because my totally paper needs to be submitted by July 12th.   .

The speeches in the Czech Republic were very well received as well.  Ben and I were treated as visiting rock stars...I must say it gets rather difficult to give a speech after our hosts plied us with several beers...

I found that both the German and Czech Hams were significantly more technically astute than the usual Dayton Crowd.  At the the first Czech talk, Pavel OK7PM gave an introductory SDR talk in Czech to start the meeting and I was quite flattered to find that he had used many of my slides (full accreditation) from my SDR-101 talk.

Subsequent to my talk, I received a request from my friend Michael DJ2RAM the Dean of Engineering at the University of Regensburg to talk to the Engineering Students .. Just need to figure out schedules

KY6LA_Howard

Lee, of course, is correct... Pavel only buys fully loaded K3's . 

To be fair, the K3S was the K3 with the new synthesizer boards which really improve the phase noise performance for the K3.  Pavel is updating all his K3's to K3S. 

But even with the new boards, the 6700 blew away the K3 on CW filters.   I am famously NOT a CW guy.. but the CW Guys all tell me that they prefer the Flex Filters..

The Czech contest groups are waiting to see how Pavel does with a Maestro in a contest...


BTW... Ben N6MUF is a long time K3 Guy and uses them on all his DXpeditions.

But guess what - Ben now owns a 6300  and prefers to use it.... So much so that he has put his K3's on the back shelf to be used only for DXpeditions..

KY6LA_Howard

You could drive over the Hilberling with a tank and it would still keep on Going...really solid German Engineering.. with lots of 20 pole filters...

W7NGA

you're not a real ham unless you've laid your arm across a code-key attached to a grid-block keyed transmitter! -W7NGA, Saigon, Vietnam

Jay Nation

A shocking, and powerful revealation.
73, Jay - NO5J

DH2ID

Yeah, and you could drive over the Nikon F with a tank (in fact sometimes that
happened in Vietnam) and it kept on working. Then came digital photography...

Ken - NM9P

Been there, done that, with an Eico 720!

Ken - NM9P

Been there, done that, with an Eico 720!

Jay Nation

Kinda like lays potato chips, nobody gets zapped just once.
Unless ...
73, Jay - NO5J

Barry N1EU

Filters are 16-pole, but still very impressive spec.

Ernest

Howard,
I finally went to the Hilberling website to see this "great" master piece.  However, I was not impress with all the knobs and switches!
It may equal the Flex-6000 series radio but for me it does not do an iota by the price or the appearance.  
I hope they do well with their 18,000 dollars radio but, I would not buy one even if you gave me the money!

Walt - KZ1F

@lee, that was an exceptionally snarky thing to say and, frankly, was beneath you. You know what makes me 'giggle'? Just how aroused some people on here get over their precious Flex. The K3S is far more than the K3 with the recalled synthesizer board that was replaced free of charge before the K3S was even announced. I don't know where the equivalent Elecraft centric board to this is but perhaps they, too, put their thumb on the scale when comparing their radio's to the Flex.