K2 Initial Test

[pagoglia]

I have been testing my K2  serial 7059 on receive only today.  It has a SSB adaptor, KAT-100 tuner, and  100 watt adaptor.  All just recently built.  I hung an 80 meter dipole with each leg 66 feet long for a start (not trimmed yet).  The 165 feet of ladder line feeds into a 1:1/1:4 Elecraft balun.  The only test I have not done on all the units, to my knowledge, is the Transmit Tests, and that is because the necessary dummy load is on backorder.  I only have a 15 watt and it calls for a 100 watt.  FYI: I have the antenna grounded with rods, but my equipment is not grounded yet.  Not sure if that would make a difference in the receive test that follows in the next paragraph.

On receive, the bands that were open were 80, 40 and 20 meters.  I could hear voices on all three bands.  On 40 and 20 meters, they sounded human.  On 80 meters, the voices sounded more high pitched.  I could not tune them in.   This was odd to me, as the antenna is cut to that band, and it would seem that the antenna tuner would not have to do any work to hear 80 meters clearly.  I am guessing that those voices should have been heard clearly?

Any suggestions?

73 de WN2K
Paul Agoglia

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[Don Wilhelm-4]

  Paul,

I would have a hard time blaming something like that on the antenna.
Furthermore, if signals are intelligible on 40 meters, they should also
be intelligible on 80 meters - the same sideband is used.  Similarly on
20 and 17.

The only thing I can think of is that your your SSB filter settings are
not optimized.  I encourage you to use Spectrogram or a similar FFT
audio spectrum analyzer running on the computer to set your SSB filters.
Take a look at part 3 of the K2 Dial Calibration article on my website
www.w3fpr.com for information on how to accomplish that - you might want
to go through the whole process and come out with a correct dial
calibration as well.

The only other thing I can think of (other than filter alignment) is
that you were listening to some lousy SSB signals (or AM signals) on 80
meters - some of them are almost unintelligible even with a properly
adjusted receiver - but then many of them are very good too.

73,
Don W3FPR

On 4/22/2011 8:16 PM, Paul Agoglia wrote:
> I have been testing my K2  serial 7059 on receive only today.  It has a SSB adaptor, KAT-100 tuner, and  100 watt adaptor.  All just recently built.  I hung an 80 meter dipole with each leg 66 feet long for a start (not trimmed yet).  The 165 feet of ladder line feeds into a 1:1/1:4 Elecraft balun.  The only test I have not done on all the units, to my knowledge, is the Transmit Tests, and that is because the necessary dummy load is on backorder.  I only have a 15 watt and it calls for a 100 watt.  FYI: I have the antenna grounded with rods, but my equipment is not grounded yet.  Not sure if that would make a difference in the receive test that follows in the next paragraph.
>
> On receive, the bands that were open were 80, 40 and 20 meters.  I could hear voices on all three bands.  On 40 and 20 meters, they sounded human.  On 80 meters, the voices sounded more high pitched.  I could not tune them in.   This was odd to me, as the antenna is cut to that band, and it would seem that the antenna tuner would not have to do any work to hear 80 meters clearly.  I am guessing that those voices should have been heard clearly?
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> 73 de WN2K
> Paul Agoglia
>
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