[Elecraft] K2 problem, troubleshooting (alignment and signal tracing)

[Jason Marten]

Thanks for the info.

To clarify some things:

My indoor random wire antenna is _very_ makeshift.  My rigs hook up to an 
LDG Z-11 tuner with coax, then on the tuner's output it goes to coax again, 
which goes to a 4:1 balun.  One end of the balun goes to the antenna, the 
other to some multiconductor rotator cable cut to different lengths for 
different bands, thrown around the floor.  I think now the problem is not 
with the TV, but with the speakers/DVD/receiver setup (made in China, I 
presume) one of my roommates bought.  I used a very similar antenna before, 
with a low pass filter, then took it down and used the wire for something 
else.  The roommate bought the speakers, and then I later put up a very 
similar antenna, lengthwise (both were from insulated speaker wire).  On SSB 
on another commercial rig, the speakers were almost acting like a PA system. 
  The end of the wire is on the other side of the wall opposite one of the 
speakers and the receiver, maybe that's the problem.  I never noticed the 
problems before the speakers arrived, when using 5W on another rig.

Connected to a dummy load, I do not get a HI CUR message at 5W.  When I 
crank up the power to 15W, I get the HI CUR message at first, then it goes 
away.  My K2 has the HI CUR setting at 2.5 amps (default).  Maybe I'll try 
again with a higher value as suggested.  I was getting the HI CUR message 
most of the time when hooked up to a yagi at my club's station.  I'm not 
sure what the SWR of that antenna is, tho I wouldn't be surprised if it's 
over 1.5:1.  I set the power there to 5W, and hit my CQ message and was 
getting HI CUR a lot of the time.

In the receive pre-alignment, I'm pretty sure I found a peak on each of the 
bands.  I'll try this again soon and record what happens.  In the 
transmitter alignment part, however, I did notice the power output 
increasing a lot with L9 on 30m and C23 on 20m, so much so that it went to a 
HI CUR warning.  Most of the time for the other bands, output would increase 
to maybe 2.3W on the peak.  I tried turning off TUNE when this happened, but 
the problem repeated every time.

As for the voltage drop when tuning... when I set my K2 at 5W, here's the 
receiving voltage and current:  13.4V, .24A.  When tuning, this changes to 
12.8V, 1.66A.  The amps slowly start to rise, and after about 10 seconds or 
so, it's reading 12.8V, 1.78A.  There's a really fat power cord (I think 
it's 10 AWG) from the power supply to a RigRunner, but a 22 AWG cord from 
that to the K2... I'll try that again with 16 AWG or bigger next time.

Thanks for all the help.