[Elecraft] [K3] ...and then there was silence (well almost)

[Dick Roth, KA1OZ]

Greetings fellow Elecrafters--

I was chasing RF in the shack, which had been causing cqrlog to lock up. 
  I was using the loudness of the hum coming out of my PC's outboard 
stereo speakers to gauge how much raw RF there might be.

Well at one point the shack got very quiet and I thought that I might 
have blown out the speakers.  No...not the case.  Here are the bottom 
line symptoms:

Any change of band and the swr goes sky high upon keying.  I hit the 
"ATU Tune" and the ATU quickly reduces the swr from ohmigawd to less 
than 2:1.  The output power, which had taken a dive when the swr was 
high, comes back to a dialed 100W.  However, the Diamond SX-100 watt/swr 
meter I keep in the line indicates that I'm transmitting almost 300W! 
Naw...can't be.

Next major symptom:  sensitivity is gone.  Even the Boston big gun 50000 
Watt WBZ, up the road, is in the noise.  I use MW to chase baseball games.

I have removed the wattmeter and my B&W LP filter as well as the surge 
suppressor from the line so that nothing stands in the way of my path to 
my Titan-DX vertical and the symptoms remain the same.

The symptoms barely change if I bypass the ATU.  I have a sneaking 
suspicion that I've blown the ATU and opened one side of the signal 
path.  That would explain the loss of sensitivity and possibly the 
ridiculously high output power as indicated by the external wattmeter. 
The on-board meters shows a proper 100W out.

I figured I'd throw this out there to the Elecraft Knowledge Base before 
tearing the rig apart.

K3>>>Diamond SX-100 wattmeter>>>B&W Low Pass Filter>>>surge 
suppressor>>>antenna feed to the world.

-- 
73,
Dick ka1oz
Middleborough, MA

Radio:  Elecraft K3/100(Kit) SN 859
Antenna:  Titan-DX