[Elecraft] KPA500 and excessive drive

Jim Weatherford repoma6103 at aol.com
Sun Jul 4 15:28:36 EDT 2021


Last night I was trying to work 80m for the first time in a while, and my KPA500 faulted. I was tired, and didn't pay attention to the fault code but simply cleared it and tried again. After a couple of rounds of this, I smelled something burning and shut off the amp for the night.
This morning I realized that the K3 output power was set to 100W on 80m even when the KPA500 was in operate mode, which explains the "06 PWRIN HI" codes when I looked at the fault table. Uh oh!
Luckily, it looks like I'm still getting full power out on all other bands, so I believe the finals are OK, and I probably smoked components in the 80m portion of the KPA500 LPF bank. Any thoughts as to which components are most likely to be damaged by excessive input power? Should I simply replace all 8 caps and 3 inductors?
73,Jim WU6K




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