[Elecraft] my K3 has some issues

[Bill Johnson]

I saw this error when I was doing a calibration.  I had the KPA1500 powered on.  Shut it off and that ended the problem.  Good luck.

Bill
K9YEQ

-----Original Message-----
From: elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net <elecraft-bounces at mailman.qth.net> On Behalf Of Chet S
Sent: Tuesday, November 10, 2020 3:02 PM
To: elecraft at mailman.qth.net
Subject: [Elecraft] my K3 has some issues

Good afternoon K3 folks,

I am new to this list and honored to be accepted. 

Recently my K3 has experienced a couple of issues. I have been unable to get a response from Elecraft e-mail or telephone service regarding the situation. It's been almost two weeks now so thought I'd ask here if anyone has some suggestions for me to try myself.

Here is the main concern:

When getting ready for CQWWDX SSB a few weeks ago, I went through setting the transmit power on each band to drive an amplifier properly. The power display seemed a bit sluggish and had a delay in indicating the SWR. Worse yet, when I got to 40M, I could not crank the power up past about 30 watts; it would momentarily display a higher number but then fall back to 30w. All other bands cold be set higher.

First I reloaded all the current firmware in the main and subreceiver. No change to 40M.

So next I went to the K3 Utility ver 1.20.1.15 to do a transmitter gain calibration. Starting with the 5W calibration, it stepped thru the first few bands OK but then stopped (I think on 40M) and displayed "ERR TXG" and the message "calibration settled at 3.6W, TX gain failed because transmit power did not reach the expected value".

In anticipation of having to send the radio to Elecraft where it might be totally reset, I manually started recording all the configuration settings.
When I looked at my filter settings, I was shocked to see that filter 1 in the subreceiver was set to 1.35. Huh? It should have been 2.80 !! Was my config info corrupted? I reset that to 2.80 and then for the heck of it tried again to set the power on 40M. That now  worked "OK"  and the swr and pwr display during "tune" showed instantly on all bands. Something had changed.

Next, I decided to rerun the TX calibration gain routine. This time if successfully completed the 5w and 50w routines. However, with a good dummy load, 40M displays an swr of 1.4, while the other bands are 1.0 or 1.1, so something is still a little funny on 40M. What might that be?

I have now been considering doing a total reset of the radio using the EE INIT function and then the self calibrations. Is this wise?

Any experiences or suggestions appreciated.

73,
Chet, N8RA

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