Topband: Fw: 3d2kj

[Ryszard Tymkiewicz]

I'm sorry I attache longer text here but our friends on Fiji have serious problems.
Below text were sent to Elecraft too but because of holidays I'm not sure if
they will be able to read it now.
Maybe someone will be able to help them?

                    73 Rys
                  SP5EWY

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Dear Sir,
My callsign is 3D2KJ (SP5DRH at home), We are on a dx-pedition on Fiji
with the main
interest to activate 160m. We have here two rigs: K2 and K3 in use. The
last night we have encountered a serious trouble with our K3 (S/N 1739)
Since that time, we are observing short (a few seconds) lost of power on
160m, while CW is used. This behavior concerns ONLY 160m! That happens
with a small power level being set at 6W, as we are using this rig to
drive an external PA. Then, the output returns to the previous level,
with a short view of a full bar on the LCD display. We tried to find if
it occurs on TUNE position as well, but it looks that it happens very
rarely there. The rate of this behavior seems to be unpredictable but it
is sometimes a few times within a minute! On other bands everything is
OK. It looks, moreover, that the
rig produces sometimes some spurious signals on 160m resulting an odd
behavior of our home made PA, while using a K2 instead of K3 solves the
problem.
This makes us unhappy since this failure might jeopardize our program.
Since one of us
(3d2mj – home sp5eaq) is an engineer in electronics, we have
performed several tests and we are now convinced that the nature of the
problem is of K3. We re-initialized the rig and nothing changed.
The transceiver is loaded with the low SWR input of the PA but the same
problem happens if it is loaded just with an antenna. Any local external
support is impossible, we have basic tools (including soldering iron),
some spare parts (but not K3 origin) and an AC/DC meter. There is a
possibility that the problem began during a crash of PA during
transmition without load (failure of antenna). The
PA has been then repaired, but soon we found the K3 problem. It might be
just a coincidence since before we had used 15W of drive.
73 de 3d2kj&3d2mj
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