[Elecraft] [K3]Microphone socket wobble

[Don Wilhelm]

Knut,

Not to worry, it is just the shell that is moving - If you purchase a 
bare mic jack, you can see that the plastic assembly to which the pins 
are mounted are not held rigidly to the shell.
If you want to fix it, remove the front panel, scrape away a bit of the 
solder mask at the base of the mic jack shell, use a soldering iron with 
a large tip and apply heat until the shell of the jack can melt solder a 
bit away from the iron loaction, then pool some solder between the mic 
jack shell and the ground plane of the front panel board.  That will not 
only anchor the shell tightly in place, but will also ground the shield.
Most microphones do not use the jack shell for grounding, but there may 
be some unusual mics with shielded cable that do connect to the shell.
If you have one of those unusual ones, then you should definitely ground 
the mic jack shell.  I have been doing that on all K2s that I repair if 
they have the KSB2 option installed, just in case a customer is using 
one of those unusual mics.
If you wonder whether your microphone connects an overall shield to the 
shell of the mic plug, check out your mic at G4WPW's website 
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rg4wpw/date.html - he has compiled an 
impressive list of microphone wiring information.

73,
Don W3FPR

ab2tc wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> My front microphone connector has always had a fairly significant wobble in
> it. Partly because of that and partly to get rid of the clutter, I have
> finally moved my Heil proset and the footswitch to the back. So this is no
> longer a big deal. Now that the socket is "naked" I notice that when I rock
> the outer ring of the connector, the pins inside do not rock with it. I
> bought the rig assembled, so I haven't personally seen how the connector
> assembly works. I am guessing that the pins are soldered to the FP board and
> that the board is not moving anything to speak of. Is the outer sleeve not
> anchored to the board at all? Is there anything that can be done about this?
> I am entertaining the idea of having a 2nd mic attached to the front
> connector, but frankly the wobble does bother me.
>   
>