I arrived at a friend's station for the 7th area QSO party at the crack of dark yesterday morning and they were pulling hairs out over a misbehaving K3. F/W V3.79. None of them knew the K3, whose owner hadn't arrived yet. It had been working fine the previous evening as they were prepping for the contest.
It would power up but as soon as you hit any button it would send a continuous side tone. I don't know if it was actually transmitting but the user interface would become mostly non responsive. You could turn it off with the power button and that was about it. There was no ERR KEY or ERR PTT display, so it doesn't seem like it was just a problem with the radio keying up. We were using VOX and not the COM port for PTT, but I forget if VOX was on. We couldn't have turned if off if it had been. There was one of the ERR BP# codes showing because the CONFIG menu wrongly had the KPBF3 installed. I don't know how that happened but I suspect someone got into the CONFIG menu and did that by mistake. Likely that's an unrelated fact. Also, this was a "real" COM port, not a USB adapter. There wasn't any radio control software running on the PC, although N1MM had been running OK with the K3 earlier. The Yaesu guy in the crowd loudly gloated that this was yet more evidence that the K3 is a flaky radio. I tried to ignore him while I worked on it. I unplugged it from its COM port and suddenly the radio was fine. Something with the port was seriously disrupting the radio firmware. We proceeded to use a different port. No problem now, just a war story and something rather odd that I don't think I've heard before. I'd be interested if anyone had a clue what might have caused it. Details are sketchy and/or missing because I was doing this under pressure to get up and running in the contest, with a Yaesu guy yelling in my ear. 73, Carl WS7L K3 #486 ______________________________________________________________ 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
