During SS I noticed that my K3 transmitter seemed to be in need of calibration, as the output power measured by my LP-100A (which I trust) seemed to be a bit higher than expected from the radio's setting and I was also observing some power "creep".
This afternoon I finally got an opportunity to look into this and indeed the transmit output is slightly high. 5W setting produces about 5.7W and 50W setting produces around 60-62 watts. I used the K3 utility to do a TX gain calibration and this seemed to only level the power on a band to band basis. 50W requested now gets me about 62W on every band. It looks as if the calibration is (understandably) using the internal wattmeter to set the power. Therefore, I concluded that I needed to do the wattmeter calibration first to see if that corrected the power set error. Unfortunately, the procedure in the manual doesn't seem to work. Firstly, it says something about calibrating in Tune mode. I tried doing the cal with both the front panel Power set to 5W and 50W and with the Tune power set to these values. The procedure tells me to hold the Tune button in the adjust menu and appears to say I should be able to adjust the output power with the VFO A knob. This doesn't work. As soon as the Tune button is held the rig drops out of Menu display and I just get the normal Tune mode behavior. Am I reading the instructions wrong? They seem pretty ambiguous to me, and no variant of what I think they could say seems to work. Has anyone successfully done a TX Cal in the field? If so, how did you proceed? 73... Randy, W8FN ______________________________________________________________ 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
