[Elecraft] K3-0-mini / K3 dilemma

[John P. Cummins, Sr.]

I have been working with a retired doctor ham friend of mine who has 
moved into an assisted living facility.  He has been licensed and active 
for more than 40 years.

He wanted to be able to use his K3 remotely and I had helped another 
friend of mine who is blind and is also a long time active ham get back 
on the air from a condo using the Kenwood TS480SAT -Remoterig RRC1258set 
implementation. This approach has worked for nearly 2 years without a 
hitch.

I suggested to my doctor friend that we should test whether it would be 
possible to operate remotely from within the large facility where he 
lived.  So we met with the IT staff there and they had no issues and 
showed that his apartment had internet already installed. Before we 
ordered any equipment I borrowed the TS450SAT control head and Remoterig 
RRC1258-control and tested from his apartment at the assisted living 
facility and it worked perfectly.

On the strength of the testing we ordered the K3-0-mini/K3 Twin package 
from Elecraft.  After getting over the shorted cable that goes to the 
ACC jack on the K3 and a dead power supply for the mini I successfully 
tested on my LAN and also from several other remote locations.  We then 
unsuccessfully attempted to operate from the assisted living facility.

For more than a month now we have been communicating with Microbit and 
Elecraft K3 support trying to figure out what the problem is.  
Additional tests with the TS-450SAT continue to operate perfectly from 
the facility and testing the K3-0-mini from several other sites out side 
of the assisted living facility also work perfectly.

Working with the IT staff at the facility we are convinced that there is 
a difference in the packets being generated by the Elecraft and the 
Kenwood but I have not been able find any documentation to help identify 
that difference.  We feel certain that the internet server at the 
facility is finding something suspicious in the Elecraft packets that 
are not present in the Kenwood packets.

Has anyone else run across something like this?

John, AD4S