[Elecraft] Re:New Crystals or Not

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

I would guess that you'll find no improvement by changing the crystals,
Rod. 

Many (most?) early K2's had crystal sets that were just fine. Elecraft
has NOT "improved" the crystals. All that's changed is that they are
ensuring that every crystal set shipped behaves more like they expect
them to. They did that by tightening up the parameters they are using to
identify "matched" sets. 

The problem was that the sets were not consistent enough, and some ops
got crystals that produced very poor results on SSB. And by poor, I mean
POOR! Some K2s sounded awful trying to transmit with a bandwidth of well
under 2 kHz. Others have had very low audio that new crystals seem to
have fixed. You say that you aren't experiencing any of this. 

I still believe in "if it isn't broken, don't fix it!". And, yes, it's a
bit of a job changing out all of the crystals - especially on the very
delicate little solder pads used on the SSB board. I was one of those
with a bad set. I didn't need Spectrogram to tell me that they were bad
and the new ones were good, only my ears. The difference was DRAMATIC. 

Ron AC7AC
K2 # 1289

Rod WA9GQT wrote:
      I use my K2 on both CW & SSB, almost 50/50. I seem to have enough
audio 
and am very pleased with CW & SSB.  I get wonderful reports on both
modes.  I 
wonder just how much my K2 would benefit by replacing all my SSB and CW 
crystals.