Phew! How lucky can you get... My original problem on my new K3 was that there was no output form the Line Out socket and very low sensitivity to input signal at the Line In socket. I now know that another problem I had was that with CONFIG SPKR+PH NO, the speaker would go silent after a couple of seconds, even with no phones plugged in anywhere.
I tried to trace the Line Out circuit, starting from the DSP's output. I had to remove the front half of the bottom cover to access P50, where the AF interconnections to the DSP are grouped. I found no output on Pin 10 of P50 where the Line Out signal is delivered by the DSP. While wondering what may be wrong, I noticed that the DSP board was not lying parallel to the front panel so I suspected it wasn't mounted right. I removed the left side panel and I then realized that I plugged J50 into P50 with the top row of pins into the botton row of sockets, so that half the pins where not connected! I fixed the problem and re-assembled the K3 and voila! all was well with the faults mentioned above. However my troubles were not over just yet... I noticed that in CW mode and listening to our local beacon on 50.499, there was a lot of distortion that sounded like clipping of the audio output. On AM and listening to a local station the audio sounded good. I really couldn't figure out why but eventually the fault cleared by itself, with the distortion going away slowly! Don't know what was wrong (possibly an electrolytic?) but I sure am very thankful it did.... I guess I should also be thankful that my sloppy assembling of the front panel didn't cause any permanent damage, possibly because there is no DC involved and the pin connections are mostly symmetric (Lineout-Left - Lineout Right etc). One nice point that came out of this experience is that I was right about one thing - one strong motive to buy a K3 kit was user repairability. I had an FT847 that developed a fault on the RIT control but I could find no spares, even from the makers, and I damaged it further trying to access the front panel internals. Kits for ever! ;-) Also, one advantage of modern times - I used the schematics and assembly manuals that are available on Elecraft's website in PDF format. Tracing a signal by name (like LINEOUT_R etc) was so much easier than searching in paper schematics - I used the keyword search of the PDF reader and could navigate the schematics with the click of a button! Thanks Elecraft, and all responders. Regards Neoklis - Ham Radio Call 5B4AZ QTH Locator KM64KR Website: http://www.qsl.net/5b4az/ ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
