K3 Utility Calibration Anomalies

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K3 Utility Calibration Anomalies

Dave Van Wallaghen
Hi all,

I have K3 #338 and had just completed the KPA3CONMDKT mod for replacing
the 12v supply pins on the RF board and KPA3 (which went very well BTW
with my Hako 808 desoldering tool). After putting the K3 back together,
I figured I would run some of the calibration routines and make sure
everything was up to snuff. I have all the latest utility and firmware
versions (including my P3). I am using a USB/Serial converter but it has
a FTDI chip set and I have never had a problem using it over the last
five years (I'm currently using a laptop without a real serial port). I
ran into a couple of problems described below:

Calibrate RF Gain:
At first, the routine calibrated the main receiver just fine but would
then fail on the subreceiver. I would get a time out error writing a
table to the DSP. I double checked all of my serial cabling and reran
the routine and could get it to fail on the subreceiver almost every
time. After numerous attempts and cable swapping it even started to fail
on the main receiver with a different error message stating the the RF
level was too low for calibration.

This certainly seems like some type of marginal condition, so I went
with a direct serial cable to the K3, bypassing the P3 and everything
works as it should. I looked through the help file and the reflector
archives and didn't find anything that said you shouldn't have the P3
connected. I did find a few guys who stated that they disconnect the P3
during calibration routines - just in case.

Has anyone experienced similar problems? Is it a known issue to bypass
the P3?

Calibrate Transmitter Gain:
The 5 & 50 watt calibrations work fine (even with the P3 in the loop).
But the 1mw transverter output calibration fails with a message that
said only 0.1mw was detected instead of 1mw. I can manually perform the
test and it works fine. With the utility I can see that it is being set
for 0.1mw of power output (instead of 1mw) and shows 0.1mw output being
generated before failing.

Anyway, I'm just looking to see if anyone else has experienced any of
these issues or do I have some type of setup problem.

Thanks & 73,
Dave W8FGU




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Re: K3 Utility Calibration Anomalies

NS0W
Hi Dave,

I have a much later serial # radio - just short of 5000. I just added some modules of which one being the KPA100. I ran the K3 utility and got the same symptom you described below (5W and 50W works fine, but the transverter fails with 0.1MW). In some cases the software would simply hang and not even complete. I checked the version of the software that I was running and realized it was way down level. Once I upgraded to the latest software, everything worked fine.

73 de NS0W
Sebastian.