[Elecraft] KPA100 with a bad attitude

[Dwayne Walker]

HI Group

Used the K2 a few mornings ago for my CW practice and got some interesting 
reports. First off in SSB I got a claim that the audio was weird, a little 
muffled. All in all I have not decided what to make of this, it could have 
easily been just listening preference of the station. He was used to 
hearing me on an Icom 706 I figure that there is a difference.

Then after a couple of rounds of CW at about 90w it just quit transmitting. 
No messages that I saw, and no change in audio from the rig. but it would 
not transmit CW none of the led's would light as I keyed the paddle either. 
after I turned the power down to below 11w switching out the PA then it 
worked, and after switching the PA back on by turning it back up in power 
it transmitted just fine for the rest of the session.

After the session there was a short rag chew on SSB near the end of it I 
got reports that all of the sudden none of the other stations could 
understand me any more. they could hear a horrible muffled signal but could 
not even make out my call sign. One station actually called me up on the 
phone just to make sure that I could hear them. After a bit of conversation 
on the phone I reached up and turned down the power to 9.5w and made a call 
out to the other station. he told me that the audio was great and perfectly 
readable.

I basically ended there as I had to go to work but I did get a chance to 
look over the web site and the Elecraft reflector archives but I could not 
find any thing like this. One ham had a audio distortion problem on 10m 
only but it exhibited different properties than my problem. no one replied 
on the reflector to his comment.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Dwayne 73

P.S. the serial number is 3403 and it has the noise blanker, SSB, audio 
filter, and 160 options. As well as the KPA100 of course.