Friday night, at the last minute, I decided to try the ARRL 160 meter contest. I only have a fairly low inverted L antenna (small city lot) so I usually don't work much DX on 160 but when the band is quiet the K3 hears everything quite well.
I usually operate low power or QRP in contests, but this time decided to play with the "big boys" and turned on the KPA500. Just so I wouldn't be causing the KAT500 to tune every time I called someone, about 20 minutes before the contest started I did a "tune" every 10 KHz from 1805 KHz up through around 1875 to get most of the info stored in the "bins". All during the contest, when I'd pass one of the frequencies where I'd run the tuner, I'd hear the "click" of the relays changing to the new settings. Throughout the whole contest so far, it's performed flawlessly and doing the pre-tuning really made things run smooth. There are those who have complained that the KAT500 is noisy when tuning, well, I'd rather hear it tuning and hear the click or two when it changes segments. That way I know it's working and it's comforting to know it's doing it's job during a contest where one doesn't really have time to mess with such things. There's only one place, right around 1825 KHz where the complex impedance of my particular inverted L configuration seems to confuse the tuner. It has to tune every 2KHz or so from 1823 up through around 1828 and occasionally I'd run into that when running "search & pounce" mode and I'd call someone in that segment of the band. I'm sure it's my antenna configuration and not the tuner because it runs perfectly everywhere else and on all the other bands. It will even match the 1/4 wave 160 meter inverted L in the CW segment of 80 meters without complaining too much. The only real 80 meter antenna I have is a Butternut HF2V vertical so it's nice that the KAT500 will work with the L on 80 (all the WARC bands too). Thanks Elecraft for producing one of the nicest high-power antenna tuners on the market. It rounds out the "K" line very nicely. Jim Sheldon - W0EB ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
