[Elecraft] Curious 1% Resistors

[Bob Alkire]

 > As I'm sitting here stuffing resistors into my K2 (#2862) rf board, you
 >know that big long tape that seems to go on forever, I started to
 >wonder. Has anybody replaced the 5% resistors with 1% resistors to try
 >to enhance or make their K2 the best one on the block.
 >Just curious, as you know a 1k 5% resistor can range from 950 to 1050
 >ohms, while a 1k 1% could vary between 990 to 1010 ohms. Would that
 >make any difference or would be like hanging fuzzy dice from the rear
 >view mirror and putting chrome wheels on your 1970 Pinto station wagon
 >and expecting your time in the 1/4 mile drag race to improve?.

I think your analogy is accurate with the fuzzy dice.

  If "Waric" (Wayne/Eric), had needed to use 1% in their design, they would 
have used them - the cost difference is not that great. In a design, all 
that may be required to meet a minimum current flow and the resistance 
tolerance can be quite large. Using 5% rather than a 1% is bit of 
information to the schematic reader that perhaps a resistance is needed to 
provide minimum current flow and can have more resistance tolerance . If 
you are designing with a resistor divider which requires accuracy with 
closer tolerance and more values, than 1% and 0.1% become necessary.

I use a free program for picking divider resistors from this guy: 
http://bleverett.home.att.net/
He came out with a windows version which broke on my Win2K system and I 
suggested coming up with a command line version: which he did. It compiles 
on Linux and Cygwin.

If you want to "hop up" your k2, there are plenty of mods out there at the 
elecraft site and http://www.qsl.net/la3za/K2/mod.html. Many are 
professionally documented and quite well done.

Anyway, my "chrome wheel mod" was changing the spinner knob, which was beat 
to death a while back on the reflector.

Cheers - regards - 73's
Bob AF6J