At my station I use a large 70 amp Astron power supply which sits on the floor. Several month ago, while trouble shooting another issue, I discovered that the voltage drop in my 8' cables was significant. So rather than crank up the voltage I switched to 8ga and now at full transmit wattage the K3S sees 13.5v. The tough part was squeezing 8ga wire into a PowerPole connector that is made for 10ga max. For a shorter lead, like I use when I travel to the Caribbean, 10ga has a minimal voltage drop.
John KK9A From: Gary Smith ka1j Hi Jim & the others who replied, This is a follow-up for someone in the future who looks for the same solution. Yeah, the small amount of difference in the wattage is insignificant but considering all the radios I've owned, the low end of the bands were always the highest output. 10M was usually the lowest output & with the K3/K3s, 6M was always as good as the other bands watt wise and 160 was full output. This not being the case, I was concerned. I had done the calibration and raised the output to 87W but that was it. As was suggested, I raised the voltage from the PS to give me 13.8V on transmit which required 14.6V resting. I'm using the cable Elecraft supplies and I'm suspecting it could be just a tad lower gauge/thicker copper to reduce the resistance but on 160M, I am now getting a 115W reading on the P3 and 113W on the LP-100A. So the increased voltage was the difference in my case. A thicker wire would certainly require less voltage than 14.6 and that's what I am going to look into. With the power Pole connector, I'll have to look a little deeper into what will work best. I have no crimping tool for Power Pole so that makes it more of a challenge. Anyway, thanks Jim & all who suggested the higher voltage, it was the answer in this instance. 73, Gary KA1J ______________________________________________________________ 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 Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
