[Elecraft] [K3] Bad COM port made K3 not work

[Carl Clawson]

I arrived at a friend's station for the 7th area QSO party at the crack of
dark yesterday morning and they were pulling hairs out over a misbehaving
K3. F/W V3.79. None of them knew the K3, whose owner hadn't arrived yet. It
had been working fine the previous evening as they were prepping for the
contest.

It would power up but as soon as you hit any button it would send a
continuous side tone. I don't know if it was actually transmitting but the
user interface would become mostly non responsive. You could turn it off
with the power button and that was about it. There was no ERR KEY or ERR PTT
display, so it doesn't seem like it was just a problem with the radio keying
up. We were using VOX and not the COM port for PTT, but I forget if VOX was
on. We couldn't have turned if off if it had been. There was one of the ERR
BP# codes showing because the CONFIG menu wrongly had the KPBF3 installed. I
don't know how that happened but I suspect someone got into the CONFIG menu
and did that by mistake. Likely that's an unrelated fact. Also, this was a
"real" COM port, not a USB adapter. There wasn't any radio control software
running on the PC, although N1MM had been running OK with the K3 earlier.

The Yaesu guy in the crowd loudly gloated that this was yet more evidence
that the K3 is a flaky radio. I tried to ignore him while I worked on it. I
unplugged it from its COM port and suddenly the radio was fine. Something
with the port was seriously disrupting the radio firmware. We proceeded to
use a different port.

No problem now, just a war story and something rather odd that I don't think
I've heard before. I'd be interested if anyone had a clue what might have
caused it. Details are sketchy and/or missing because I was doing this under
pressure to get up and running in the contest, with a Yaesu guy yelling in
my ear.

73, Carl WS7L
K3 #486