[Elecraft] K2 #6030 on the air!

[David Fleming]

I finished building the basic K2 on Wednesday night. I had just finished
aligning the receiver and transmitter, still had the cover off, when I
heard an Italian station calling CQ around 7010 KHz, so I gave him a
call. He didn't respond, but F3NB came back to me! I was running 10
watts into my Hustler 5BTV vertical. He gave me a 579. What a thrill!
My first contact with the K2 was to France with 10 watts! WooHoo.. I
worked a couple more stateside stations at 10 watts, then backed the
power back to 5 watts and worked several W6's. I think I'm going to
like this QRP business.

Everything seems to be working fine. I kept getting a HI CUR indication,
so I increased the current max to 3.5 amps and that cured that. At one
point the keyer started acting wacky. It seemed to have a mind of it's
own. It was sending random character instead of what I was sending. It
did that for a couple of seconds and then went back to normal. Hasn't
happened since. I'm not sure what that was all about. No other
problems! It's a wonderful little radio.

Now on to the SSB module and KIO2!!

Maybe I'll try my hand at the Elecraft QSO party this weekend.

Regards,

-David W4SMT