[Elecraft] A reminder.

[William M. Spaulding, Sr.]

Hi, Gang,

I turned on and tweaked up my last piece of Elecraft gear (I don't have my
XV50 yet).

Initially, I couldn't get the SWR null below about 3 volts in my KTA100-1.
That didn't seem quite right.  I looked at T1's leads.  A couple looked a
little suspicious, so I pulled it out, re-tinned the leads and reinstalled
it.  No soap.

I bumped C32 (right next to the adjustment cap C31) while I was poking
around.  One of the leads popped out of the hole!  The part had been
soldered, so I thought it was a cold joint.  I re-heated the connections.
Lo and behold, C32 popped right out of the hole again!

I examined things carefully.  C32 is a ceramic cap that had the "dipped"
coating on the leads.  I thought I had cleaned them, but it wasn't good
enough.  I took the cap out completely and cleaned the leads again.  Then I
lightly tinned them.  I put C32 back in and soldered it.  Now the circuit
nulled to 7 mV at 100 watts!  I figured that was good enough.

Moral:  CLEAN the coating from capacitors where the coating material can get
into the holes, and maybe even tin the leads right up to the body to make
sure the solder will take when it is placed in the board.

Now that I'm done building for a bit, maybe I'll try to nail the frequency
tweaking to better than .01 HZ! :-))

Really, I think I'd really rather operate for a while!  These things are fun
on the air, and now I'm QRV fer QRO!  HOT DOG!

73

Bill
NA7Y