No secret here: on 80 I noticed on the panadapter that he was moving down a bit after each qso. Started calling below the last qso and got them.

Tor
N4OGW

The ARRL 10m contest is one of the best places to pick up close states on 10m.

Because you will not have direct propagation it can be hard and signals will be very weak. You will probably have to work them via some kind of scatter. If you have a directional antenna you usually get the best signal pointing it towards the place 10m is open to, which could be in the opposite direction from the station you want to work. Using CW rather than SSB will make it easier.

Tor
N4OGW

I think a panadapter with a display like CW Skimmer (with or without callsign decoding) is much more useful than a spectrum or waterfall display for cw operating. See http://www.dxatlas.com/cwskimmer/ for a picture of what I mean. Basically, it scrolls like a waterfall, but is oriented horizontally and moves much faster so you can "read" the cw visually.

I do find this very helpful in split pileups. I don't have a P3, but use a LP-PAN with my K3.

Tor
N4OGW

One program I have found very helpful when building HF yagis is YagiStress (http://k7nv.com/yagistress/). It will estimate the wind survival of your antenna.

It also does useful things like figure out the weight of the antenna, whether it is torque balanced, where the balance point is, the resonant frequency of each element, etc.

Tor
N4OGW

Yes, the K2 doesn't have a second receiver, but you can add a tap to the IF for a SDR receiver (I did it on mine). That gives you easily a panadapter which is even more helpful in a big pileup.

Tor
N4OGW

Yes, cheaper for the 10W radio. But there isn't a KX3 equivalent to the K2/100 available yet, because the 100w amplifier (KXPA100) isn't out yet. It seems the KXPA100 will be both a 100W amp and an ATU, suggesting it won't be as cheap as a K2/100 without the ATU.

Tor
N4OGW

I used two K2's for several years as my main radios, mostly for contest operating. Since then I had upgraded to K3's, although I still have one K2 for backup/portable operation. I originally used one K2 along with an Omni VI. I found that the K2 receiver was better than the Omni, so I sold the Omni to buy a second K2. The K2 receiver is almost as good as the K3, but the K3 does a little better in crowded bands.

Yes, the controls on the K2 are small. I pretty much got used to that however. For contest operation you can control many of the functions from a computer anyway. Some other considerations:

-if buying a K2, I wouldn't bother with the audio DSP. The buttons controlling it are so hard to use during a contest that I basically just left it on one setting continuously to reduce hiss. The cheaper audio filter is just as good for this.

-There is one "feature" of the K2 firmware that is really inconvenient for contest operation, especially SO2R where you change bands a lot: after a band change, the RF output power is always increased from zero (presumably to protect the finals). After a band change the RF power starts at zero and slowly comes up to whatever it is set to over a second or two. It is slow enough to make the first letter or two on CW inaudible to other stations. The result is that my call at ~35 WPM comes out as "...UOGW". In practice you have to be sure to press "tune" for a second or so (transmitting a carrier) after every band change. I can't think of the number of ?'s I got in response to calling stations due to this.

I didn't find the K2 hard to build (I built 2), but it does take a lot more time than a K3.

The KX3 looks good, but be prepared to be QRP for a while- there is no 100W amp available yet.

Tor
N4OGW

I have 116 WPX listed so far for 90,000 LOTW qso's. It is going to take a while

Tor
N4OGW

Except that with an amateur license you couldn't legally transmit the broadband HF radar signal required to get an ionosphere sounding

Tor
N4OGW

The point is that a "real" panadapter has much better resolution than the scope on your Pro III and you CAN pick out individual callers. I usually use a display where the signals scroll sideways (like CW Skimmer). This is much better than the vertical spectrum displays because it shows a few seconds of time history of signals.

With this kind of display you can actually read the CW signals visually from the dots and dashes and often pick out who is responding to the DX. If you use Skimmer, it will decode the callsigns and whoever is sending "599". There is a picture at http://code.google.com/p/so2sdr/ showing what I use.

Tor
N4OGW

Get both: there is no reason the panadapter has to be an expensive present. You can do one quite cheaply using a Softrock
SDR receiver kit (<$50) and get all the benefits of say a P3. Or a LP-PAN if you can spend a little more.

The main time in "DXing" when I use a panadapter is figuring out where to call in gigantic pileups. It helps immensely there.

Tor
N4OGW

One area where Linux has total dominance is high performance computing. Take a look at
 https://www.xsede.org/high-performance-computing for example and count the number of
systems running Windows 7

Tor
N4OGW

I also worked FT5ZB twice in 1988, unfortunately I never got qsl card

Tor
N4OGW

Will the audio input do stereo, or is it only one channel?

Tor
N4OGW

Hey, KY used to be the western frontier

I have moved around a bunch and never changed my original callsign. One solution to the original problem is just sign your call with no "/" and to operate a lot. Once people get used to hearing you, they will eventually remember where you "really are".

Tor
N4OGW/5 (but only 40 miles outside of 4-land)