<< I can not understand why one would want to run the K3 at 100 W rather than 20/30/50 Watts. Why drive the K3 harder when driving it more lightly should improve reliability and possibly improve linearity. The waste of energy is also undesirable; the fifty watts out that is discarded probably costs 100 Watts of energy. The idea of adding an attenuator for 50 Watts of energy sounds mad to me and environmentally unfriendly as well.>>
Doug, The primary reason is safety, and the secondary reason is a cleaner signal. While the K3 does not have overshoot, many rigs do. This compounds the drive problem, and it compounds the overshoot problem. For example my IC706 overshoots to about 140 watts whether the output power is set at 50 watts or at 100 watts. If I have an amp that drives at 40 watts and the radio overshoots to 140, that is disaster. If I have an amp that drives at 80 watts and the rig overshoots to 140, it might not blow up and the broadband "pulse" generated by leading edge overdrive will be a whole lot less level and even less duration. The 3 dB attenuator is a **very** good idea, because nothing can fix or reduce these problems except a pad. External ALC won't work. 73 Tom ______________________________________________________________ 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
