[Elecraft] K2/KPA100 Results in IARU W1AW/5 20M CW

[Tom Whiteside]

Well, it is over after months of planning and preparation!  This note will
be a bit brief both due to fatigue and to another impending Texas
Thunderstorm off the port bow...

I think this was a very good test of a K2 in combat, contesting conditions.
As an HQ station in this contest, the pileups were fierce with many strong
stations calling at once.   It was also a bunch of continuous operation over
a 24 hour period.

The station consisted of a 5/5/3/5 antenna stack that scoops up lots of
signal to present to the K2's front end.  In turn, the K2/KPA100 was driving
an Alpha-87A and punching a bunch of power right back out.   70W output from
the K2 drive the 87A to 1500W so it did not have to run full out but was
transmitting a good percentage of the time for the contest.   Worth
mentioning is that we did not have to touch the K2 power knob *ONCE* during
the entire contest!   The K2's ALC held things just super constant the
entire time.

I did rig a muffin fan to blow in the K2 heatsink - not required but it
seemed like a good idea.  A Variac was tweaked to make the fan blow as hard
as it could without adding noticeably to the ambient noise level.    The
room is small and despite having an extra air conditioning duct to the room,
it stayed a toasty 30 degrees C!   I measured the KPA heatsink temperature
immediately after the last CQ at 36C which seems remarkably low given the
duty cycle and the room temperature - even given the muffin fan.

AF5Z ran the pileup for the first 2 hours before a break - Bob is (I think)
the best pileup op in the area with his skills honed from years of living on
Guam where he faced a pileup everytime he fired up a rig.   Even given that
massive pileups with many stations running high power and the large receive
antennas, the front end just won't overload.   Bob reported a personal best
2 hour rate with something on the order of 275 QSOs handled.   We did almost
1600 raw QSOs on 20M total and this included some incredibly bad QRN hours
with big storms all around.   I left the QSK interval fairly short - just
long enough to mask the noisy big signal backscatter you get running huge
power with big antennas.   So hearing someone calling us was easy and there
is not the fatigue you get with some radios and QSK.   I did get one
complaint - the keying waveform needs to clicks to help keep the frequency
clear - just kidding, Wayne...

Not much else to say, really - it just worked and worked well.   Thanks to
all that worked us and to the team at Elecraft for a super product!

Tom Whiteside
N5TW Georgetown, TX