[Elecraft] Elecraft K1 on 80m

Mon Jan 5 05:32:00 2004

Hi folks and happy new year to all. I'm a new ham with only 5 months
experience on the air and use the K1 which is doing fb. 40m has been awful
lately in the evenings so thought I would use the holidays to change my ant
from 40m dipole to 80m. The 80m dipole is in a straight line at about 30
feet and the last few feet hang down vertically. It is fed using about 150
feet of 50 ohm coax. with no balun. I have cut the dipole ends to get a swr
of approx 1.5 at 3.500 to 1.7 at 3.560 as measured on an external watt/swr
meter. I assume this is as good as I am likely to get. It works great and I
have had a host of contacts with good reports however, the K1 seems to have
problems matching it. I use the kat1 ATU and when I go into tune mode it
comes up with an swr of 1.1 (fine) but the output power does not match the
set power eg 5 watts out = 3.5 watts setting, also current draw is often
too high. The kat 1 had no problems with the 40m dipole with similar swr.

(Dave, is this the problem that you solved with your mod to the kat1 (extra
capacitance) or do I have something else.)

It's not a big problem but when the K1 takes much more than 1A, my little
psu starts to go unregulated and I can hear the mains ripple on the audio.
BTW when this happens does this mean that the transmitted signal gets
degraded in any way or is it OK provided the input volts stay above 8.5V.
Also will a 1.5A drain damage the K1 power stage?

Getting on 80m is good for me since there is a lot of good quality cw at my
speed. The cw is coming along just fine with a combination of qso's,
copying and reading from tapes and radio. I've knocked together a simple
rough and ready single lever paddle from bits in the garage and it works
well with the K1 built-in keyer, can't believe how easy it is to send nice
smooth cw with the paddle, the poor old sk is getting dusty hi.

I hope to add the 40m wires to the 80m dipole when I get the time to give
me a dual bander (tri bander if you count 15m). I find 80m very noisy, is
this normal or is it because the ant is nearer the house. One of the good
things about cw is that noise doesn't really spoil the enjoyment provided
that you can here the dits and dahs. The brain seems to just get used to it
and filters it out.

Thanks to all in advance

73's
Martin
M0KWV
K1 #1534, K1-2, K1-4, Kat1

Why not take a look at our Web site?
http://www.simoncarves.com

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