[Elecraft] K2 Tx lock enquiry

[bejones@hursley.ibm.com]

Nicholas
               The K2 does indeed transmit outside the UK bands - for 
example 40m stops at 7100KHz here in the UK and goes to 
7300KHz in the US. However that is still inside the amateur bands 
(albeit those for a different IARU region).

If it is not simple for Elecraft to supply a custom UK microcontroller 
then I wouldn't worry. The point made in the regs is to stop people 
using SSB on 27MHz (illegal here in the UK). I even took my K2 
capable of transmitting outside UK bands to a 'test your equipment 
evening' run by the RA at the local club. They were all very 
impressed and I was very worried while they checked the harmonic 
suppression but it came through with flying colours. 

Incidentally your M3 license doesn't give you privileges on 10m - to 
be logical you would need your K2 locked for no-transmit in the 28-
30MHz range! 

Pretty much all rigs are capable of transmitting out of band, either 
through harmonics or transmission of wide bandwidth signals at 
band edges. 

The real pain is on VHF, the UK band stops at 146MHz, just where 
the US repeaters start. I have both UK and US licenses - a few 
years ago it was a real pain finding a 2m handheld that transmitted 
up to 148MHz (easy to find in the US, hard in the UK) and also had 
the 1750Hz tone burst needed to fire up UK repeaters (easy to find 
in the UK, hard in the US). Hopefully its got easier now as I broke 
the Standard HT that fitted the bill only last week :-( 

Interesting that Spain actually requires a rig test for in-band TX. 
Also many US readers on the list will probably find it strange that 
the UK licence regulations are written in a legal document that is 
often ambiguously worded (if anyone really is interested take a look 
at http://www.radio.gov.uk/ - find Amateur Radio from the A-Z Index 
link and the various BR68s are down the page). In the US there is 
an exteremly useful ARRL publication explaining the FCC regs, 
sadly (or possibly fortunately since we can interpret) no equivalent 
exists in the UK.

Brian G0UKB
Brian E Jones
Pervasive Computing Specialist
IBM HURSLEY