[Elecraft] K2 Bands?

[Nick Waterman]

Jay W6CJ/AAR9QM wrote:
>> What are the transmit/receive limits of the K2- is it ham bands only?

Basically it was DESIGNED to be really good at ham HF bands, nothing
more, nothing less.

There are several things limiting general coverage ability, but mostly:

Bandpass filters, but luckily these are REASONABLY wide and the K2's
such a sensitive receiver that it'll do quite a good job even well off
down the filter skirts.

You can probably tweak bandpass components if you wanted to make them
even wider. There are mods around to deliberately NARROW the 40m
bandpass filter for the smaller EU 40m allocation, so it wouldn't be
hard to deliberately widen them either.

VCO: This has upper and lower limits on voltage for each band, and the
useful oscillating range may be even narrower, but the useful limits are
deliberately arranged to be fairly well above the top of each band and
fairly well below the bottom of each band. When building, you're able to
shift these up slightly or down to raise or lower both ends of the bands
a bit, but having made sure all ham bands are well within VCO range, you
probably want to leave your settings there and go through the
calibration steps. You can then tune fairly well outside each band and
OFTEN the top of one band might even overlap the bottom of the next band up.

You can possibly tweak VCO components a bit too.

... but again, it was never designed to be general coverage or anything.

See http://www.elecraft.com/Apps/K2_GenCov.htm for one example. Remember
every rig will be slightly different though.

Geoffrey Mackenzie-Kennedy wrote:
> My K2/100 #3255 can transmit / receive outside of the ham bands. I have
> not checked the limits.

I won't ask how you know that   :-)

-- 
"Nosey" Nick Waterman, G7RZQ, K2 #5209.
use Std::Disclaimer;    sig at noseynick.net
The average human eats 8 spiders in their lifetime at night.