[Elecraft] K2 5087 first breath and some ot stuff

[jferg977 at aol.com]

Comrades,

What a great kit! as well as a great manual!  I'm up to end of second 
stage of construction - where you can start listening on 40 meters and 
I was astonished at what I could hear even with the goofy antenna I 
threw up on the upper deck of our boat (qth?).

But I do have a question.  The final Part II action is 40 Meter Band 
Pass adjustment where you adjust L1 and L2 for peak signal strength.

I did it doing first L1 and then L2 and did indeed strengthen the 
signal.  Is there some sequence that this should be done in?  Do L1 and 
L2 affect each other such that this should be a more iterative process?

Advancing to  completion will probably need to wait until I pass 
elements one through three, hopefully next month.

On another subject:

I asked for advice last spring about whether to get paddles or a 
straight key right from the start.  Interestingly, the preponderance of 
advice was for a straight key although two of you did suggest I buy 
whatever I was going to use and have at it.  I wanted to practice 
sending to see if it was going to be a problem and supposed that if it 
wasn't, learning to send would hasten picking up the listening.  Guess 
what, the two things have nothing to do with each other - at least in 
my head.

I bought  Palm paddles and their neat little keyer which has an audible 
sidetone.  I can send almost 20 wpm from printed material - goes in the 
eyes and out the fingers without much thought.  sending off the top of 
my head is harder because I lose track of where I am - asynchronous for 
sure.  But all this sending practice did absolutely nothing for 
listening. I' getting there but I hadn't reckoned on the sending 
practice not being particularly productive.

I also built a Micro908 analyzer.  I'm blessed with very poor vision - 
near sighted which means when I take my glasses off I can read anything 
including the 1206 smt diodes in the micro908 kit and the glass diodes 
in the K2 kit.  After the 908 experinece, I don't quite see what the 
apprehension is about building surface mount stuff - it seemed easier 
and quicker to me, but then I could see what I was doing.  My guess is 
that if you can't easily see these things, then it would be very very 
hard.

I'm 63, and built Dynakit Hi-Fi's for my Dad's friends when I was a kid 
as well as Heath, Eico, and Allied Radio's stuff.  I think the K2 is 
really better than any of them although it may be that the design is 
more repeatable - K2's built carefully are likely to be more 
electronically similar than the things I did in the '50's.

Thanks much for this great product.

John Ferguson