[Elecraft] Thanks and a 'heads up'

[Dan Presley]

Up here in temperate Portland,Or we are slowly digging out of a foot 
of snow-hasn't happened like this in at least 10 years! We had no 
snow for the past 2-3 years, so everything is shut down. As a result, 
I've had time to finally finish some radio projects. I finally got 
around to fixing the counter preamp on the K2, so I could re-align my 
filters, which were not quite right ever since I did a bunch of the 
updates this last spring ( told you I was behind!).I also wanted to 
thanks Gary at Elecraft for correctly diagnosing my problem, which 
was a malfunctioning Q9 on the control board. This transistor ( along 
with Q10) are part of the counter preamp which allows you to read the 
bfo freq, voltmeter, etc with the counter cable connected to the test 
points. I couldn't adjust my filters because the counter couldn't 
read the bfo freq-kept coming up 0000.00. Gary said that Q9 & 10 are 
very sensitive to static-here's what he sent me

At 17:03 -0700 12/2/03, Gary Surrency wrote:
>Look for less than 0.7VDC on the base of Q9 when CAL FCTR or CAL FIL is
>running. A bad MPS5179 will show around 0.4VDC. I just fixed a kit here with
>that very problem. Touch something that is grounded first before plugging in
>the counter probe, since these high freq. transistors have very tiny
>junctions that are quite easy to blow.


I didn't think to ground myself before plugging in the probe, but 
after replacing Q9 I'll remember :)
-- 
Dan Presley-N7CQR-Portland, Or QRP-L #502
n7cqr@arrl.net