[Elecraft] Re: first impressions

[Wayne Burdick]

Thanks for your comments, Dave. 

> 1.  Those of you in the USA say you can use the Preamp all the time.  Not so here in
> Europe, last night I did get a few intermods from the broadcast stations.  However
> performance is so much much better than my FT101ZD, and perhaps the only reason you
> like to use the preamp is that the band sounds so quiet anyway.

If you add a KAF2 option, things will get even quieter. Since I
installed the first prototype in my K2, I find that I rarely use the
preamp below 15 meters. The passive elliptic low-pass filter removes
whatever residual hiss gets by the second crystal filter.

And oh, by the way, you also get a UTC clock/calendar with this option  ;)


> 2.  Having eventually managed to get the bfo alignment correct, all cw filters
> (normal and reverse) are working fine.  Not so happy with the ssb filters, but that
> is a minor problem as I won't be installing the ssb option.  

The CW filter, while tunable over a wide range, is optimized for narrow
bandwidths. SSB filter bandwidths set up using this filter are going to
be narrow and will have quite a bit of passband ripple. If you like
wider bandwidths for casual tuning, or if you want to listen to a lot of
SSB and AM, you might still want to put in the SSB option. You can set
any of your CW filters to use the wider filter on the KSB2.


> 4.  Instant 'wish list' - to be able to cycle through the filters in reverse
> order, ie not to need three pushes to go back to 400Hz from 100Hz.  

You can't go in both directions, but as Tom mentioned, you can turn any
of the filters off. If you really only need 400 and 100 Hz, use FL1 for
400, FL2 for 100, and set FL2 and FL3 OFF using CAL FIL. If you add the
SSB option, you'll want to have three setups: FL1 = OP1, FL2 = 400, FL3
= 100. This is exactly what I use.


> Perhaps though I could code the PF1 and PF2 switches to do this?

Not with the present firmware.


73,
Wayne
N6KR