I bought my K3 used. It's now a bit over six years old (S/N 8240). The seller kindly included the manual, original invoice, a repair invoice and even the Fred Cady book. The K3 was factory assembled, with a factory-installed KRX3 subreceiver and the BNC auxiliary antenna connection.
If I had bought a new K3 or K3S I probably would not have bothered getting the subreceiver, but since I have it, I figured I may as well put it to some use. I don't chase DX but the notion of experimenting with diversity reception interested me. So I threw a chunk of wire over the roof and connected it to the BNC input. Admittedly not a really good diversity antenna (much too close to the main antenna, for one thing) but OK to play with. When I found that the Carrier Operated Relay was operating as I sent CW, in order to protect the sub-receiver, I stopped until I could get and install an Array Solutions Receiver Front End Protector. So I had many months of fun and even found that at times there was enough diversity between the antennas to help with reception in the face of fast QSB. And then suddenly the sub started failing. I check it when turning the radio on, and often the sub is working but then after a while it stops. It doesn't seem to be correlated to transmitting, i.e., it may stop after I've been sending but not always and never right away. There has even been a time or two when it didn't work initially but then came back to life after a while. Often it will work on 20 and up but not on 80, 40, and 30. I've opened the radio, taken the cover off the sub, and poked, wiggled and re-seated everything I could get my hands on. I've even tried this poking while the radio was powered up and the sub was quiet, to see if any poking could bring it to life. Nada. I suppose at this point the "right" thing to do would be to send the radio to Elecraft and I may do that at some distant future point, but right now I feel that I don't want the sub badly enough to warrant the expense and time. Of course if meanwhile anyone has a miracle cure to suggest, that'd be great! Thanks for listening. 73 Ray K2HYD ______________________________________________________________ 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 Message delivered to [email protected]
