Bill and All,
I would think (hope?) it would. My concern is that it takes
the ATU a while to achieve the 2:1 match on 160. When I do
it, I do it at reduced power, so that the K3 is hopefully
not working too hard in the process. This may be done
automatically now, but I was under the impression that for a
time there was no power fold back during tuning. Easy
enough to verify though, by just putting a power meter on
it. Anyway, I then crank the power back up, but generally
only to around 70 or 80 watts. That's may be another
unnecessary precaution, but 80 watts vs. 100 watts won't be
noticed at the other end anyway. But if my ATU had to
struggle a bit getting that 2:1 match, I feel that I could
easily loose that match very quickly just because the R8
might be bending around in the wind or something. If
anything up there is a little loose, that 2:1 could become
15:1, or something like that, in a heartbeat. Supposedly
the SWR protection would kick in, but I'm just a little shy
about trusting it. Loading a 26 ft. vertical on 160 meters
just seems a little scary I guess. I may be kidding myself
thinking I'm making it less risky with these precautions,
but intuitively it seems prudent. Of course, trying this at
all may be anything but prudent!
It kind of interesting though. On 80 meters the K3 gets a
1:1 match very quickly. And that is just about anywhere on
the entire 75/80 meter band. I expected it to struggle
there a bit too, but it just doesn't. But results aren't so
hot, and the efficiency is probably pretty sorry. Since the
R8 is supposedly a "half-wave" system, it presumably is
something like a 1/4 wave on 80 without an effective ground
system to compliment it. It makes me wonder if there would
be much improvement noticeable by putting up 2 or 3 tuned
radials for 80 meters. One of these days I may do a little
tinkering with that.
Dave W7AQK
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill W5WVO" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <elecraft@mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 7:17 AM
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Questions and K3 options? Please!
David Yarnes wrote:
but I don't--at least not routinely. I really only get
about 2:1 there, and that tells me "watch out!" If you
can't get something close to 1:1 using the ATU, you
probably
need to be cut the power back a little or a lot...
I would think the SWR protection circuitry in the K3 would
do this for you
automatically. I guess I always assumed that, like
virtually every other rig
out there, the K3 has automatic SWR foldback to protect
the finals... Am I
wrong about that?
Bill W5VWO
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