[Elecraft] K3 Utility Calibration Anomalies

[Dave Van Wallaghen]

Hi all,

I have K3 #338 and had just completed the KPA3CONMDKT mod for replacing 
the 12v supply pins on the RF board and KPA3 (which went very well BTW 
with my Hako 808 desoldering tool). After putting the K3 back together, 
I figured I would run some of the calibration routines and make sure 
everything was up to snuff. I have all the latest utility and firmware 
versions (including my P3). I am using a USB/Serial converter but it has 
a FTDI chip set and I have never had a problem using it over the last 
five years (I'm currently using a laptop without a real serial port). I 
ran into a couple of problems described below:

Calibrate RF Gain:
At first, the routine calibrated the main receiver just fine but would 
then fail on the subreceiver. I would get a time out error writing a 
table to the DSP. I double checked all of my serial cabling and reran 
the routine and could get it to fail on the subreceiver almost every 
time. After numerous attempts and cable swapping it even started to fail 
on the main receiver with a different error message stating the the RF 
level was too low for calibration.

This certainly seems like some type of marginal condition, so I went 
with a direct serial cable to the K3, bypassing the P3 and everything 
works as it should. I looked through the help file and the reflector 
archives and didn't find anything that said you shouldn't have the P3 
connected. I did find a few guys who stated that they disconnect the P3 
during calibration routines - just in case.

Has anyone experienced similar problems? Is it a known issue to bypass 
the P3?

Calibrate Transmitter Gain:
The 5 & 50 watt calibrations work fine (even with the P3 in the loop). 
But the 1mw transverter output calibration fails with a message that 
said only 0.1mw was detected instead of 1mw. I can manually perform the 
test and it works fine. With the utility I can see that it is being set 
for 0.1mw of power output (instead of 1mw) and shows 0.1mw output being 
generated before failing.

Anyway, I'm just looking to see if anyone else has experienced any of 
these issues or do I have some type of setup problem.

Thanks & 73,
Dave W8FGU