[Elecraft] DSP first impressions

[Ron Willcocks]

Hi all,
         The KDSP2 arrived here this morning, and the soldering iron was
 immediately warmed up. I had been reading a download of the manual so was
 pretty well schooled up on the proceedure for assembly.
 It all went together very well with only one small hitch with the 20 pin
 female header J1 being one that had a row faulty connectors that wouldn't
 allow the insertion of the connector pins. Luckily I had read about this
 problem on this Reflector and fixed the problem before mounting the
 connector.
 Whoever said the KDSP2 is a tight fit in the K2/100 didn't mean maybe! I
 notice the holder for the DSP chip actually overlaps the first rim of the
 speaker. I bet Lyle was sweating when he first tried the fit!!
 Anyway the smoke test was passed without resorting to the fire
extingiusher,
 and the initial tests were passed OK. I did have a bit of a head scratch
 trying to find the clock settings, but another read of the book fixed that.
 Initial tests on air made me wonder if I really liked it, but I have gone
 through all the menus now and made a few adjustments to how ( I think) I
 like it. (I can see a lot of "fiddling" with parameters coming up)
 My initial concern with it was the signals sounded like they were "tearing"
 ....or breaking up....especially weak ones, and I feel altering the "decay"
 setting from 71 down to around 40 made it sound heaps better (to me anyway)
 I set the filter "centre frequency" to my sidetone frequency and rearranged
 the filter bandwidths to how I  like them. There is certainly a degree of
 user control in this gadget the KFL2 doesn't have.
 I have only briefly tried it on SSB and the results with the denoiser seem
 pretty dramatic.
 Yes, I think can say it *IS* a big improvement over the KAF2 (which was
very
 good), and I have a lot of playing  with it to possibly wring out the
 parameters that suit me most.
 I have lost count of the number of times I have changed bands instead of
 toggling the denoiser! (Early days yet)
 Anyone in ZL / VK looking for a cheap KAF2 ??
 Cheers......Ron ZL1TW