Same goes for the Philips QBE 3.5/750., same socket as well.

Just a small company with  growing pains. All these upstarts are under resourced  and full of enthusiasm. They are not Apple or Microsoft who can throw around a few hundred people here and there for PR exercises.

That does not excuse the poor behavior from  Flexradio as reported. These days sending a email indicating that they dont have the time or resources to participate in the event would have taken 5 seconds of anyone's time.
This would have been the best  thing to do from Flex's perspective rather than wasting other peoples time with false expectations.

When I was interested in buying Flexradio I was exchanging emails with John W5GI who worked for Flex at that time. John was a straight shooter and never weaseled his way out of the tough questions.
I asked him specifically about the spurs and the IMD performance, he said straight out dont buy the Flex 5000 because there was no fix for these issues.  He always said he would check with the experts and get back to me. When he said he would send you an email tomorrow at 12pm, it would be there at 12pm. I think this was more reflection of his military background and personal ethics rather than following the companies procedure manual.

All radios work regardless of the brand, performance numbers or whatever. I think some people are expecting too buy a brand X radio and when they turn it on they expect miracles?
This is never going to happen even if you bought a RF harris 20,000 dollar HF manpack.

With QRP and portable antennas you just dont get receiver overload because the antenna limits the signal impact on the receiver. Now a radio like the KX3 would work fine if you took the KX over to K3LR's QTH
and connected it to his 40 meter stack. Thats the kind of antenna that would cause a radios front end to crumble in the heat. This is never going to happen  on a picnic table with wire strung up into the tree.  I own  a 
SPY RADIO Type B MK II from WWII and it works as well on 40 meters as any other QRP radio.  Even this antique does not overload to the point where you would say I need to go buy a KX3. You really need to confront the limitations of portable operation before stating one radio is going to be better than another.  The laws of physics limits the receiver performance more so than the engineers ability to design a great receiver. Poor antennas, man made noise and keyclicks and IMD will  be noticed long before your QRP  receiver collapses. The only receiver that I owned that collapsed was a regen and a crystal set, and who uses these today for QRP operation?

The KX3 like the FT817 is a nice toy to own because its cheap and affordable. Just like everyone has a HT, the KX3 and FT817 have the same level of affordability. Unfortunately their practicality is another issue. Radios like the KX3 and FT817 will probably be placed in the same draw as the 2meter or multiband HT and rarely be used because they impractical for most of us. They can be pulled out on rare occasions when needed  and you feel like banging
your head into a brick wall while using crap antennas. Obviously if you use a decent antenna like dipoles your success rate improves, which is how  most people do their qrp operation.

While its nice owning a cutesy small radio, the real limitations  with these kinds of portable radios is their battery life. In this regard  the KX3 is klutz because it has poor battery charge management and poor  battery selection options.
WHo cares if you can fit a radio into a wristwatch if you cant operate it for longer than 5 minutes? This essential point is a forgotten by many designers of portable ham equipment.

 Its exactly the reason why I prefer my old AEG HF manpack radio. I can just about use it for  a whole day without worrying the batteries going flat. I can connect it to my car battery, plane battery or AC for charging. I carry spare battery module which gives me another  24 hours of operation. Now with the KX3 i have to feed it AA batteries all day, and if you use name brand batteries you will go broke. Rechargeables are no fun either, most of the ones that you buy at discount stores are Chinese junk that fail after 3 or 4 charges if you are  lucky. All this just equals huge hassles and major annoyance factors. It would have been easier if the KX3 had a build in  battery pack and smart charging system with the options of plugging in a Solar panel, 12 to 50 volt DC source  or a AC source  and all of  this in 1 box. These days with portable solar panels that have  built in MPPT regulators/chargers you could have been operating and charging the KX3.

Now if you add all these features to the KX3 or FT817 you hardly have a portable solution. You have mess of electronics laying in a big pile thats a nuisance to carry. You would need a pack mule to carry all the options and bits and piecse if you going for a serious trail walk. Now I can only imagine how the mess that you carry worsens when you carry a HF amp. I am not worried about receiver performance I am more worried about  my back from all the extra weight I will be carrying with all the required accessories to make the radio effective!

You dont have a portable solution if you cant operate  a radio for at  least 24 or 48 hours without being a near a recharge facility. When ham radio manufacturers start building a product like this they will get my money, in the meantime   I  will just continue with my homebrew/surplus junk that does the job in more effective manner like most QRP/portable operators. The KX3 is not  silver bullet miracle that solves  all the problems and limitations that confront real portable operators.. You cant rest your laurels on receiver performance only! In my world. a self contained  HF manpack is the ideal portable  HF setup, and 20 watts   is more than enough to make the whole exercise enjoyable.

If it was me contemplating buying a KX3, I would just wait till all the novelty factor wears off. There will be a lot of them for sale when owners dump them for whatever reason. This is exactly what happened to the FT817. Everyone rushed out and bought them and  only the serious operators stuck with them. The rest ended up on the second hand bargain market. I have already seen 2 KX3's advertised for sale.

The wide clicks  that I have noticed come from a lot of the autotune and solid state amplifiers. Many owners of these amplifiers use ALC for protection. When the amp is not tuned correctly or the VSWR is slightly off
these combinations of amplifiers and certain radios cause wideband broad keyclicks.  These clicks can go very wide, far wider than just ordinary keying sidebands.  You also get problems when  switching between the amp and the radio is not perfect.

 When you watch these stations on a SDR or Panadapter its like watching   wave in the ocean, as it rolls toward the shore. In this case wide clicks or sidebands roll away from the signal and then settles down. You however still hear the keyclicks. With the wide spread availability of SDR radios and pan adapters everyone should really be monitoring their signal quality and the SDR is perfect tool for doing so. With the peak hold turned you can see the signature of the destructive keying spikes and how it takes out several KHZ causing QRM. This  problem seems to very prevalent with Acom 2000 amplifiers and certain radios.

It seems clicks during CW contests have become the norm, its really hard to believe we have gone backwards in regards to total keying bandwidth in this day and age. Today we should have  radios producing perfect narrow band CW keying but this is not the case today.

Ideally if someone produced a piece of software for a SDR receiver it should have a narrow band occupied bandwidth MASK which quickly give a pass or fail on your signal. Its just very hard to convince manufacturers and authors
of the SDR software too implement such features. All they concerned about is useless features and coarse resolution bandwidths. LINRAD by SM5BSZ has got the best set of tools for determining occupied bandwidth of SSB and CW signals. There is no piece of SDR software or pan-adapter that  has the same ability to determine and monitor occupied bandwidth, they all just eye candy monitors  when they could be good spectrum analyzers.

There was story on Eham about LED lights from a shop jamming the Swedish Bus VHF radio network.

This is a real serious issue that most authorities are just ignoring.

The whole issue of radiated emissions from things like Plasma TV's, Solar Inverters, MMPT regulators/panels and LED lights need to be looked at and new standards developed.
The  EMC laws are just not keeping up.

The problem is that the major name brand products fix their design issues .The failed designs end up in a Chinese copy factory and they are churned out by the millions under various brand names.

It does not help that the EMC laws are not enforced at the borders, they just accept the fraudulent EMC markings from the Chinese factories. Whats worst is that they  allow EMC labs in China to do the certification
and they will say anything  for money. The EMC certification process in China is corrupt and non existent in other countries.

The real problems for hams in Western  democratic countries is that the authorities wont do anything  about prosecuting companies who import products that dont meet EMC standards.
The Chinese and most importers know this and thats why they  just keeps on importing the junk.

The LED lights to watch out for are these. If you get one of these near your ham radio days are over from 1.7 to almost 150mhz. These are legal 10 to 50  watt broad spectrum jammers.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/10W-LED-Flood-Light-Floodlight-Lamp-Warm-White-Garden-Outdoor-Lamp-/121057218689?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c2f929081

They sold by various ebay sellers and as re branded  versions in stores. They have no EMC compliance whatsoever. This is a disaster for the broadcast and ham bands and they just flowing
into countries around the world from China.

Its astonishing that such a product can be legal to sell anywhere when it causes so much interference. The QRM will be 40 DB over S9 if you used one and something like 20db over S9 from
a neighbor. As usual the people paid to enforce the EMC laws just turn a blind eye to this crap from China, and users of the radio  spectrum who pay a license fee get ignored. A sad reflection on how are societies are allowed to
operate these days.  What I can never understand is that manufacturers who produce products like these in their own country would suffer the full consequences of the law and have to spend countless hours and dollars
meeting these EMC requirements. Then on the other hand importers and ebay sellers can flout all these laws to the disadvantage of legitimate manufacturers who meet the EMC standards.

These LED lights are worst than things like plasma TV's and on a band like 80 meters where signals are very strong you wont hear a thing.  If you were a facist regime or  a dictatorship like North Korea and you want to jam
as much of the HF spectrum on a budget you would install this type of LED light. If you see these around please report them to your radio society EMC committee, you will hear them!

When I was dealing with HRO and shipping stuff out of the USA HRO was just the best to deal with. There was a lady there named Janet she was very good at her job.
I would not have bothered  dealing with HRO if it was not for Janet. Anyway if you ordering from HRO just ask for Janet, she makes things happen in a professional  manner.

Yup,  resistance against SMT parts are just from hams who are too lazy to build anything. You hear this excuse all the time "them thar  there parts are too small for my eyes" Its just a rubbish excuse really. Why I know this?
When the K2 first came out these same hams at the club were complaining about SMT. I brought in my first K2 showed them the kit and construction. All the super hams chickened out of the club buy of the K2 project.
If you dont want to build ham gear just say you dont want to do it rather than making up BS excuses about the part sizes. SMT is easy

You can also get one of the PC USB microscopes and use  them as your eyes.  In pinch I even use the camera on my smartphone if i cant see something.

I am old and have shaky hands and I find SMT much easier than through hole parts and kits. I can assemble a board much faster than a through hole kit. Once you have the right tools and magnifying headset
you fly through the assembly.

If you do decide to get into SMT get yourself the best possible SMT tweezer set with parts holder. Just avoid the rubbish from China.

I also  have mastered the technique  of removing SMT parts. I just use a bog blob of solder at the end of the iron and move the part around. WHen the part moves I just flick it off with the iron tip. Its lot safer
than the cutting the part technique which can left those fine PCB traces. 60/40 lead solder works best for this. Some of the none lead solder does not "blob" up as well as the 60/40

Another good trick to make SMT assembly fly is this. Get yourself a flux pen and flux up the pads before soldering on the parts. Its amazing how better the solder flows once you have fluxed the pad.

PCB layout for SMT is also much easier for SMT parts than through hole.

KK7B,  R2 DC receiver. Its amazing! I think kits are still available from a company called Kangaroo or something like that

Just build a Single 3-500 amplifier. This tube makes the best beginners amplifier. You can leave the space in the box for another 3-500, but thats not necessary most of the time.
You can use all the supported parts from Harbach for the SB220 and Drake L4B. All the modules are build and ready to go. You can also buy many of the parts from Ameritron for the AL80 amp.
Its also easy to find  spare SB220 transformer on Ebay.
If you contact Lou from King 6 meter conversion, he might have many of the parts for sale from a gutted 6 meter converted SB220.

Why I like the 3-500 is that its instant on. 3 minutes can be an eternity when you trying to work the DX.  This makes you less like want to have a solid state amplifier.
I have got all sorts of homebrew amplifers with every tube imaginable and my most used amp has 3-500's in it

Florida  is one of the best locations in the USA to put a station. When I traveled around on DX'peditions  in Africa and the Pacific, I could always hear stations in Florida when there were
no other stations on the band. Theres also a lot of retired hams down in Florida so you hear them  on the air at all sorts of odd hours when the rest of the USA is sleeping.

If Ham A is  right on the salt water or in a salt swamp he is going to keep up with the 100 ft tower and probably hear and work DX that nobody else is going  hear.
That thing called the brewster angle is what does it if you near saltwater and its  worth having. The real problem is that anything near saltwater is expensive in Florida. Then you have all
that noise from all those apartments and the vertical would be the worst antenna to have.  If you cant hear them you cant work em!

Then the next problem is that unless the ham is on a small saltwater island his signal  will only be good beaming over seawater.

If the Ham in FL is stuck way back from the coast and over poor ground conductivity the vertical is going to be owned by the 100ft tower.

I would take the 100ft tower because you can put together a nice single tower station using either Optibeams, Ultrabeams or Steppirs. For that matter a hexbeam up 100 ft would beat most stations in the city with lower beams

I used to work a station on the Westcoast in Suncity. I think he is a silent key now. He was in a retirement community. He had 3 Butternut vertical  that installed as a phased vertical array. He had 60 radials on each antenna.
He had an impressive signal on all bands from 40 through to 10 meters. Where he was the ground conductivity was not very good. His main competition on 40 meters was using the cushcraft 2 element beams. If I blind folded
you and you just listened you could not tell who was using the beam or the butternut phase verticals.  His phase verticals worked very well. He used a variable phasing system that was published in one of the ARRL compendium books.
So verticals installed properly can be competitive, just avoid using these no ground all band rubbish verticals.

Its like shoes, you need to try them on! Same goes for keys, feel is a personal thing.

One of the best CW operators that I know has been using 2 X J38s strapped as a paddle, this ham is HS club member and he has used the same pair of J38's for at least  40 years. No Begali or Vibroplexers in sight!

Skimmer is incredible. Skimmer while it decodes CW it would not be the best for daily use since the decode is only on 1 line. I just notice when I use Skimmer that it seems to do a half reasonable job.
I dont know if CW Skimmer can use a larger window like CWGET. The thing that I find is that it does not really matter if the accuracy is 100%, if you can see 4 or 5 lines including garbage on the screen
you can work out what is being said if you like using a decoder. Anything with a small display cant give this ESP ability.

The CW decoder on the K3 is very temperamental and  because of the limited screen size you cant see the general QSO details because it scrolls into nowhere.
At our club they have beginners station and it has the K1El K42  decoder/keyboard. The only thing that annoys me  about it is that it uses a fixed pitch something like 600HZ.
I think its the best LCD decoder that I have come across in terms of accuracy.

I dont  need to use them but i like seeing  what the potential of the technology is. I think the program with the most potential would be skimmer if it was turned into  general
CW  QSO package rather than a skimmer  semi only application.

I think noise is the worst enemy of these decoders and like DSP noise reduction on HF, unless we go digital CW decoding will always be a hit and miss affair, thats why its best using your head.

You might email the author of CW SKIMMER and see if a general decoder package is available. Skimmer in a contest is scary the way it decodes so many callsigns.

My best straight key is the HiMound  HK702. The one with the big white marble base. This Key is just as good as the  Amplidan and Marconi Straight keys.
The himound is as smooth as butter. The best feature about it is when you adjust  the settings stay put even in temperature extremes. I like very close spacing  on my straight keys which I like for
high speed  straight keying. Many keys if you set the contact spacing too close and it heats up a bit  the contact expand and start keying the radios. I always had to unplug other straight keys for this reason.
Since I never turn my radios off, I always had this problem until I got the Himound.