[Elecraft] [K3] Sub receiver intermittant failures

[Ray Albers]

I bought my K3 used. It's now a bit over six years old (S/N 8240). The
seller kindly included the manual, original invoice, a repair invoice and
even the Fred Cady book. The K3 was factory assembled, with a
factory-installed KRX3 subreceiver and the BNC auxiliary antenna connection.

If I had bought a new K3 or K3S I probably would not have bothered getting
the subreceiver, but since I have it, I figured I may as well put it to
some use. I don't chase DX but the notion of experimenting with diversity
reception interested me. So I threw a chunk of wire over the roof and
connected it to the BNC input. Admittedly not a really good diversity
antenna (much too close to the main antenna, for one thing) but OK to play
with.  When I found that the Carrier Operated Relay was operating as I sent
CW, in order to protect the sub-receiver, I stopped until I could get and
install an Array Solutions Receiver Front End Protector.

So I had many months of fun and even found that at times there was enough
diversity between the antennas to help with reception in the face of fast
QSB. And then suddenly the sub started failing.

 I check it when turning the radio on, and often the sub is working but
then after a while it stops. It doesn't seem to be correlated to
transmitting, i.e., it may stop after I've been sending but not always and
never right away. There has even been a time or two when it didn't work
initially but then came back to life after a while. Often it will work on
20 and up but not on 80, 40, and 30.

I've opened the radio, taken the cover off the sub, and poked, wiggled and
re-seated everything I could get my hands on. I've even tried this poking
while the radio was powered up and the sub was quiet, to see if any poking
could bring it to life. Nada.

I suppose at this point the "right" thing to do would be to send the radio
to Elecraft and I may do that at some distant future point, but right now I
feel that I don't want the sub badly enough to warrant the expense and time.

Of course if meanwhile anyone has a miracle cure to suggest, that'd be
great!

Thanks for listening.

73
Ray K2HYD