[Elecraft] K2 in the ARRL DX CW

[Tom Whiteside]

Howdy.   My beloved K2 is coming up on it's second birthday - bought the kit
at Dayton 2000 and sure have enjoyed the beast!    This weekend, a group of
friends came over and we did a 1500W multi-2 effort from here.  What's that
got to do with a K2?    Well, for the first time, we tried using the K2 as a
spotting rig on a non-active band.   The idea is to use the K2 scanning the
bands to line up multipliers that the big fellers can go get - this is
particularly useful on the low bands where a 160M or 80M spot is no
assurance that a station is workable from Texas.   By making a list of what
is workable, the run stations can quickly go pick off the goodies and return
to CQing.

The challenge is hearing without radio overload.   My station is designed
for multi-2 with separated towers and bandpass filters on each of the 2 run
radios - this really solves that problem for them but the spotting radio was
a late breaking idea and we had no filter for it - or antenna for that
matter.    I rigged a switch from my Beverage antennas to the K2 and this
worked quite well - even for listening on 10M!   On the low bands, my
Beverages need a preamp that was not run to the K2 but we just turned on the
K2 preamp on 160,80 and 40M.    Now my main preamp has a high 3rd order
intercept and a bandpass filter but it suffers from intermods - not so with
the K2.    The K2 heard so much better on 160 and 80M that I can see I need
to work some on that preamp....   What was especially impressive was that
you just did not hear the other stations at all in the K2.   And my
Beverages pick up plenty of signal snaking around the towers - especially
running 1500W...     Everyone that did spotting duty was amazed.   One time
I carelessly did not notice that we were actually running on 10M while I was
tuning through 10M with the K2.   Didn't even notice any degradation until I
got about 30 KHz away and started hearing a very loud strong N5TW coming
through - I quickly retreated....

What a staggeringly great front-end the K2 has!  Bet I sold a couple this
weekend!

Tom Whiteside
N5TW Georgetown, TX