Friday, February 5, 2010

Work has begun on my new (to me) Elecraft K2

A number of years back I purchased a partially-built Elecraft K2 kit from a co-worker who lost interest in building it about 1/3 of the way into it. I had always planned on using it as an IF rig to drive VHF/UHF/Microwave transverters, since it's very well suited for the purpose.

Well, the kit sat on the shelf for years and gathered lots of dust. Oddly enough, a few years later the co-worker was re-invigorated in his interest, bought and built a new K2 kit! A few weeks back I completely tore apart my workbench and got it finally configured the way I wanted it, with all the test gear powered up and in the right position. I had previously only been able to power up two devices at a time which made it difficult to build anything.

Feeling like I could fix anything, I found a little bit of motivation and dug up the K2 kit. Several layers of dust later and I was into it! When my co-worker had first started building the kit, it was the first major electronics project he had taken on which resulted in a few problems that needed to be worked out. Simple things, like missing soldering a ping on an 8 pin DIP, etc. Simple, but will stop you dead in your tracks if you can figure out why it's not working! At this point the rig is working on 40m CW, and I'm starting the next build phase.

I get the feeling that I'll need to re-visit 40m in the future, I think it's suffering from a lack of sensitivity, but I feel the need to march forward. I figure at the rate that I'm moving (slow) it will take me a couple of weeks to complete. I still also need to build and install the SSB module and I also plan on picking up a KIO2 module.

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