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California trip about a week ago

Did I mention that I was in California 1/18 -1/21?

5 degrees F  Tuesday morning at MSP


Squeezing into the Airbus 319


I brought some reading material


It was 80 degrees F when we arrived in Irvine



Fast forward after a week of business meetings...

A lovely lunch at the Airport on Friday


Our Airbus getting ready to leave SNA


A nice sunset someplace over Utah


It was near 0F when we arrived back in MSP Friday night


Sorry for all the camera phone pictures but the size is right when you are on a business trip.






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At the range





Ben and I stopped at the archery range on the way to the grocery store. Ben was pretty excited to try out the compound bow that he got for x-mas. By the end of our time at the range today he had a couple of more accessories: wrist release, peep sight, and a pin sight.

After getting the bow sighted in he was shooting some tight patterns.

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K2 SSB Testing



I have a challenge with my:
K2+KSB2+K160RX+KIO2+KAT2+K60XV+XV144+XV222+XV432+IMA rework module

Initially I was noticing that my CW power levels on my transverters was spot on but when I switched over to SSB that my power was really low. Don suggested that I should test K2 on 40m (forget the complexity of the tranverters for a minute to baseline the system.)  After I did that I noticed on 40m my LSB signal was about -3dB compared to my CW signal. I then send a note to Elecraft reflector to get some feedback.

Geoff GM4ESD made the suggestion to run the same test at 28mhz (IF freq for the transverters) and see if I had similar (linear) results.  I liked Geoff's suggestion so much that I decided to test all of the major bands and then graph it out. I ran the test twice. I used my Ubuntu laptop to generate an audio signal at a fixed frequency to help improve the reproducibility of the test.

The K2 is connected to a 20dB directional coupler then another 20dB then into my Booton microwatt meter. (My original test used my Booton meter and an oscope to confirm that SSB audio was low)

Test 1: I connected the audio out of the laptop into the radio with a patch cable

Test 2: I played the audio (very loud) over the speakers and placed an Icom HM-36 microphone near the amplified speaker at a fixed distance.

Both tests produced similar results.  I then normalized the results with the CW level being referenced to zero and built the graph above.

Initially I was thinking that maybe I had an issue with the microphone bias but I think that I have disproved that by using the audio out of the computer. --Still looking for answers.

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ATS4 Day 2

Lots of small parts.....




I have today off as a holiday prior to leaving on a business trip tomorrow morning. In between my other chores for today I paid the workbench a visit. I just soldered down approximately 104 surface mount capacitors, resistors, and inductors. Most of the parts today are 805 sized components.

I would estimate that I probably spent close to three hours on these parts. I lost a couple and had spares on hand in my parts boxes. I was short one part as well and was lucky that it was a standard value component that I had on hand.

Overall the project is starting to take shape. It will be at least next weekend before I will be able to work on this again as I will out of town on business for the remainder of the week.

73 de NG0R