Hi Bill,
Congratulations on your excellent showing on Field Day. With that many
QSOs, I'm sure you'll do very well in your division. Yes, FD is a bit
of work, but it's also a great chance to get outdoors and try your hand
at emergency communication setup. I think you'll be back next year ;)
...seemed to me that the CW bands were surprisingly empty. ...
Wow -- that wasn't my impression at all. I heard wall-to-wall CW
signals on 20 and 40 meters most of the time, and a good number on 15
and 80 meters. Having done FD for some 10 years in a row now, I'd say
that CW activity is about the same as ever.
When using QRP on Field Day, you need a lot of patience and the best
possible antenna. What I usually do is put up at least two antennas
(typically, orthogonal long wires that favor N-S and E-W). You can
connect both to the KAT2 or KAT100 at the same time, since both ATUs
have dual antenna jacks. You can then quickly test both antennas, even
on a per-signal basis, using the front panel ANT1/2 switch.
QSK...
Where did you have T-R set in the menu? At T-R = 0.00, the receiver is
unmuted very fast, which can cause a small receive artifact with
certain narrow crystal filter and DSP settings. But we recommend using
T-R = 0.01 or higher anyway. For casual operation, use T-R = 0.02 to
0.05.
The time required to cleanly switch the VCO between RX and TX is around
10-15 ms. We put a high value on completely clickless and chirpless CW
keying, and adjusted firmware delays accordingly. Still, wiith TR =
0.01, you should be able to hear between characters (not words) even at
50 WPM. If not, you may have an assembly or component problem
somewhere.
It's likely that we could improve VCO lock time and obtain between-dits
receive at such speeds. This is one item on my list of possible future
mods for the K2.
Power meter...
It's a good idea to adjust POWER when not keying. During transmit, a
small additional amount of hysteresis is added to the POWER control to
improve noise margin, and this can increase the power-control step
size.
You can also usually adjust one resistor value in the BFO attenuator to
improve power-setting accuracy. Some JFETs (Q24) have much higher
transconductance than average, leading to coarser steps from the 8-bit
DAC. To compensate, try increasing the value of R98 from 270 to as high
as 470-820 ohms. (This experiment is best done with a small trim pot
installed; replace the pot with a fixed resistor close to the final pot
value.) If you adjust R98's value, make sure that the rig can still
reach at least 10 watts on all bands with POWER set to 10.0.
CW messages...
In order to store the maximum possible characters in the K2's CW
message memories, the firmware "quantizes" your sending into
standard-length dots, dashes, and spaces. This is not as forgiving as
using a "times-8 clock" for recording, which is characteristic of some
keyers. But such keyers have a much larger EEPROM than the K2 does, or
they don't provide as many characters of storage. It's conceivable that
we could go to a larger part in the future and use a times-8 or even
times-16 sample clock. (Another item on my future mods list....)
73,
Wayne,
N6KR
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