[Elecraft] [K3] Transmitter Calibration Procedure

[Randy Farmer]

During SS I noticed that my K3 transmitter seemed to be in need of 
calibration, as the output power measured by my LP-100A (which I trust) 
seemed to be a bit higher than expected from the radio's setting and I 
was also observing some power "creep".

This afternoon I finally got an opportunity to look into this and indeed 
the transmit output is slightly high. 5W setting produces about 5.7W and 
50W setting produces around 60-62 watts. I used the K3 utility to do a 
TX gain calibration and this seemed to only level the power on a band to 
band basis. 50W requested now gets me about 62W on every band.

It looks as if the calibration is (understandably) using the internal 
wattmeter to set the power. Therefore, I concluded that I needed to do 
the wattmeter calibration first to see if that corrected the power set 
error. Unfortunately, the procedure in the manual doesn't seem to work. 
Firstly, it says something about calibrating in Tune mode. I tried doing 
the cal with both the front panel Power set to 5W and 50W and with the 
Tune power set to these values. The procedure tells me to hold the Tune 
button in the adjust menu and appears to say I should be able to adjust 
the output power with the VFO A knob. This doesn't work. As soon as the 
Tune button is held the rig drops out of Menu display and I just get the 
normal Tune mode behavior.

Am I reading the instructions wrong? They seem pretty ambiguous to me, 
and no variant of what I think they could say seems to work. Has anyone 
successfully done a TX Cal in the field? If so, how did you proceed?

73...
Randy, W8FN