[Elecraft] K3 COOLING VENTS

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

Guy, K2AV, wrote:

Blown solid state finals in HF rigs have been a common complaint in said 
decades-long gossip stream.  

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It would help if we could see their plates glowing red before they failed. 

Many times I've set the loading on my homebrew rig finals using the color of
the plates to decide max power for the duty cycle being used, and I don't
recall *ever* having to replace a final tube.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work for solid state. 

Modern rigs are like cars with power steering: you crank the knob and hope
the designers did their job so well you don't have to make any judgment
calls. 

That's been true of my K2 for the past decade. 

The few times they discovered something that could go wrong as more
customers like me used (and sometimes abused) the rig, they fixed it with a
mod post haste. 

I expect the same will be true of the K3 over the next decade.   

Ron AC7AC