[Elecraft] K3 Check Your Buttons

[.k8dd.]

Paul,

I am very surprised that this has not come up before!
My K3 is #570 and it has had 4 front panel boards (a couple for what I 
called flaky or just bad switches and the rest for other reasons) and 
the same problem you describe is still there.  The latest one is the 
best, but I still get some strange things happening - mostly with the 
BAND and MODE switches, but it has occurred occasionally with other 
switches, and it is not very reproducible - it can be very intermittent, 
or it can happen fairly often.

When the K3 went back to Elecraft the beginning of the year for a 
different problem they checked out the Front Panel switches and said the 
switch operation is fine, but it's not.  I have seen the problem on a 
fairly new K3 owned by a ham near here .... I have seen the problem on 
the K3s at the Elecraft booth at Hamcom.  Again, it is intermittent.

For the longest time I figured it was me and the way I press the buttons 
on #570 .... I did try SW test and Sca Adc - at times the beeps were 
slow, unevenly spaced or did not appear at all and it did not seem to me 
  that the switches with flickering scan codes were the switches that 
were causing mis-operations.  But when I press and hold the ALT to 
switch sidebands, and the radio changes three modes, maybe a band, 
reverses sideband and turns on the RX ANT, it causes one to wonder .... 
but K3support does not have any of these problems!

So I have decided that the K3 switches are a trade-off to have the best 
receiver that is out there in the Amateur market.  And so are the 
several other operational quirks, but again I can put up with those when 
and if they come up to the top of the "upcoming K3 features" list.

Like you, I'm out of warranty, so $400 is out of the question for yet 
another Front Panel board.  Besides, I don't think it can be fixed.

73    Hank    K8DD


Paul Ferguson wrote:
> I own K3 #757 and recently noticed some of the front panel buttons were not 
> working. They either did not work at all or gave strange results. I contacted 
> support, and they advised me to use the Config  Menu SW Test to check all 
> buttons. 
> 
> If you have not tried it, go to Config Menu, rotate VFO B until the "SW test" 
> entry is selected. Rotate VFO A until "Sca Adc" is selected. Now press every 
> button, one at a time, except the Power button. When you press and hold a 
> button, you will see the button´s row and column codes displayed as a single 
> digit followed by 3 digits. As you hold each button pressed, the code should 
> remain stable. Note the Band and Mode buttons have different codes for pressing 
> the left or right sides. Also the 4 encoders to the left of VFO A (Shift, 
> Width, Speed/Mic, Cmp/Pwr) have scan codes when pressed.
> 
> When I tried the test, some of my buttons produced flickering codes or code 
> values jumping around. Support advised me to push the suspect buttons down 
> firmly and move my fingertip around as I pressed down. This seemed to help, but 
> I am still showing a few problems. 
> 
> I checked with a friend owning a K3. He tested his buttons and found the last 
> digit of Fine and Rate flicker. Support said a slight flicker of 1-2 digits is 
> OK. Most of them should be steady at one reading.
> 
> My K3 is out of warranty. Options are buying a new Front Panel board at about 
> $400 or sending the Front Panel to Elecraft for repair at the standard hourly 
> rate. I am going to monitor the problem for a while and see if there is some 
> pattern to the failures.
> 
> You may want to test all your buttons. I had never tested them before and I 
> might have noticed a problem before the warranty expired. It is also a good 
> idea to test the buttons when you think you are chasing a different problem. My 
> original symptom was the RX button would not switch to the receive antenna. I 
> even tried reloading the firmware before realizing multiple buttons were not 
> working.
> 
> 73,
> Paul
> K5ESW

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