In article , dave
wrote:

You'll notice the K3 is the #1 transceiver in every class (depending on
configuration). While it costs twice what the Yaesu does, it can grow
with you. It is made in USA and is the best radio ever made.

WOW !!! - Thanks, that is one serious rig from elecraft.com

Downloaded their pdf file and drooled over the features and spec's.

Egad, everything seemed so simple, now I have to decide what I
_really_ want in a rig.


You know what this means, I will need to park my carcass in the
parking lot of the nearest Walmart, hold up my cardboard sign
begging for money for Ham Radio gear.

I do free volunteer work for the local hospitals here in N. California,
trying to beat them into submission to adopt faster/better ways of
processing their mountains of paperwork.

Presently, most of them still use chisels and clay tablets
to document their medical procedures.

Only about 10% of USA hospitals take advantage of faster
speech recognition processing of data. (SR for brevity)

As a half-vast user of SR myself, I am used to stomping out
medical data on my Macs and PCs by voice, commonly dictating
complex 600 word medical reports with zero text errors
in four minutes time, wrestling phrases such as:

"perioperative transesophageal echocardiography"


Have to admit though, sometimes my tongue gets wrapped around
my eye-teeth so I can't see what I am saying.


Back on topic -
********

Seems the Elecraft K3/100 HF Transceiver would be ideal for
expediting emergency medical data in case of a national
catastrophe - - - one problem might be that FCC reg's do not
allow encryption of sensitive medical data, if I recall correctly.

I expect in a national emergency that FCC edict would
be quickly waived, allowing common sense to prevail.

Mark