[Elecraft] K2 Mods

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

Wayne has said on several occasions that he strongly recommends the 2nd
Xfil Flattening Mod. I can tell you from personal experience that SSB
sounded very poor on my K2 before it put it in. John, KI6WX has a small
refinement to the mod in his documentation that makes the resulting
filter response even flatter.=20

A LOT of us had trouble with 'scratchy' sounding AF gain pots, and we
ran the AF gain near zero at all times. The AF Gain mod fixes this by
rewiring the gain pot to put it in a more conventional circuit than the
original design used. The original circuit depends upon the pot shorting
out the AF in order to turn the gain down, so at the low end it assumes
the pot will be a dead short. They seldom are, and to the low end
settings become touchy and the gain tends to jump around and control
sounds 'scratchy'.=20

If you are going to work PSK or other digital modes with the SSB module,
then the mod in John, KI6WX's documentation to improve the ALC
characteristic is highly recommended.=20

Those are the one's I can recommend from personal experience. At least
the ones I can remember. My Elecraft "manual" is not a thick manila
envelope stuffed full of notes and loose scraps of paper. Somewhere in
there are the remnants of the original manual...

Sverre, LA3ZA, has a list of mods at
http://www.qsl.net/la3za/K2/mod.html that includes a brief description
of each mod and comments about what it accomplishes.=20

Ron AC7AC
K2 # 1289



 talk about "approved K2 mods" and such has piqued my interest. What are
the best (yes I know this is a loaded question) mods for the K2. I'm
currently building one up and was wondering if I should build it to the
current manual specifications and do some mods later or go ahead and add
some of the mods now. If I do add any mods, which ones? Nothing too
complex, like those sub-miniature caps in the CW filter mod. My
operating is casual, mostly CW though some SSB will be had and the
occasional contest.

Cheers,
Colin
N=D8YGY

PS - I know Elecraft has a link to a couple of sites that have a list of
most of the available mods. I'm interested from a average operator,
average builder standpoint.