[Elecraft] K1 dead band on 20M - Follow-up

[Mike]

COLIN WHITMORE wrote:

> ... I guess in the end, I will be asking Elecraft to send out a
> new cap. Though I believe for ten bucks I can get a set of their
> less sensitive trimmer caps, maybe that's the route I'll go.

Replacing the white ceremic trimmers on the early KFL1-4 boards with the
blue temperature stable trimmer caps is highly recommended.  I put off
doing it for months, but on occassion I found my K1 transmitter power
very low on certain bands until I re-aligned the board.  Since
installling the blue caps, I've had no similar problems.  I wish now
that I'd done the replacements months earlier.

I found that the 16 white ceremic trimmer caps were easy to unsolder
without the aid of a solder sucker, since there was enough room under
each to use a small screwdriver blade to pry the cap out.  The only
difficult part was getting the now empty solder holes sufficiently clean
to allow the new caps to be mounted flush to the PCB.  Even using a
solder sucker and several passes, I was not able to get the holes clean
enough for the replacement caps to just slide in.  But a little heating
while pushing gently on the caps worked just as well and just as
quickly.

While I had the KFL1-4 out, I doubled the size of C10 and CK to allow 7
watts out all across the 40m band from 7 to 7.16 MHz.

Mike / KK5F