Another "great idea" failure

[Ray Albers]

From time to time I like to do portable ops with my Elecraft KX-3 (like yesterday, when I sat under the pavillion for an hour participating in the SST - Slow Speed Test).

The KX-3 has a tiny built-in speaker which is fine, but sometimes I want, or need, to use earphones or earbuds.  So my "great idea" was to buy a cute little (measures 2 X 4 inches) Bluetooth transmitter to stream audio from the "phones" jack to my hearing aids - yay! No earphone cable dangling over the operating position on the picnic table.!

So I set everything up, pressed the power button on the Bluetooth transmitter and it worked perfectly - on receive.  Then I heard a station calling CQ SST and I tried calling him, and that's when the "good idea" went down in flames.  There's a few hundred millisecond delay with Bluetooth streaming audio (Duh! I should have known that!), so of course the paddle presses and sidetone sounds are out of synch.  I found it impossible to send anything but garbage. I suppose I could (in theory at least)  yank the earphone plug every time I want to send so that I'm hearing the sidetone from the speaker, and quickly plug back in but that stikes me as so clumsy I didn't even bother to try it.

Oh well, maybe I'll find another use for the Bluetooth transmitter.

73

Ray K2HYD