[Elecraft] K2 - Problems on 40m

[Zac Brown]

Fellow K2 builders,

Well my K2 has been up and running now for about 2 weeks.  I finished 
building the KAT2 last week and finally put up an antenna that should be 
able to work 80 - 20m this weekend.  My previous antenna was a 20m attic 
mounted horizontal loop fed with coax.  The new one is a 135 ft outdoor 
flat-top fed with ladder line.  So far, I've been very pleased with the 
K2 and with the new antenna setup.

All bands seem to be working fine except 40m.  When I attempt to 
transmit (or tune) on 40m, I'm hearing some strange "chirping" noises in 
the headphones, then the display shows "low p", regardless of which 
antenna I plug into it.  It does the same thing when I plug in a dummy load.

When I key, I hear the chirping sounds as well.  It almost sounds like 
very small birds chirping under water.  Also, when I key, the s-meter is 
showing some strange behavior.  It looks like 4 or 5 different bars are 
all lighting up at once, and they're not even sequential bars.  For 
example, the left-most bar, a few in the middle, and the right most bar 
might light up.  Some appear to be flickering.  I'm only getting these 
problems on 40m - all other bands appear to work fine.

The really strange thing is that 40m receive and transmit appeared to be 
working fine last week.  The KAT2 was able to find a match even with my 
undersized loop.  But, when I transmitted, I did notice the chirp and 
the s-meter was behaving as I described above.  I tried it a few times, 
then went back to 20m.  Nothing much has changed here except for the new 
antenna, but as I said, it's doing the same thing even when I plug it 
into a dummy load.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Zac
KD5IEF
K2# 4907