KPA500 Clicks & Pops
Posted by
ANDY DURBIN on
Oct 16, 2018; 1:52pm
URL: http://elecraft.85.s1.nabble.com/KPA500-Clicks-Pops-tp7645665p7645686.html
I found this quite annoying too. My approach was to try to understand how the Z bracket temperature varied relative to the heat sink temperature. I placed a thermistor on the front end of the Z bracket and another on the heat sink fin closest to the Z bracket. I logged the standard PA temperature and these additional thermistor temperatures for every transmission I made (still do). I established baseline temperature characteristics and planned to use this data to see if any mods I made changed the characteristics.
Surprise! - When I though I had enough data to move on to the next step in the investigation it stopped clicking.
Adding the thermistors only required removal of the front panel and the Z bracket screws were no touched. It continued to click after the thermistors were added and then stopped a few weeks later.
The data show the rapid change in temperature is at the PA sensor only. The heat sink and Z bracket change much more slowly and never have a large temperature difference. Their temperatures do cross over though.
One problem with temperature logging is that I had no data, except for my test notes , on the clicks themselves. I had planned to added some inexpensive sound detection modules and add this data to the logger. That's on hold until the clicks come back.
It's really nice not to have the amp click continuously on every FT8 transmission. I wish I knew what fixed it.
73,
Andy k3wyc
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