Carl, There is no more interesting QRP band than 15m when it is open. When 15m is not open, often 17m will not be open. IMHO, 15m is clearly the better choice over 17m for the KFL1-4. Of course, if you were really set on having both 17m and 15m, the KFL1-4 in reality supports 40m, 30m, and any two of the 20m, 17m, and 15m bands. But few would ever want to give up 20m coverage.
I built a 80m/17m two-band KFL1-2 board for the other two official K1 bands. I use it infrequently, for the K1 is not really designed for frequent filter board swaps, especially if you have the KAT1 antenna tuner board installed. I use the "150 kHz" VFO span. Actually, you'll get 170 kHz. The R19 I mentioned several days ago does a pretty good job of linearizing VFO tuning, so you'll get about 17 kHz for every full turn of the VFO pot. With the "80 kHz" VFO span, you'll get about 9 kHz per turn. But 17 kHz/turn is *NOT* at all a very high tuning rate! The only reason that some find it to be "touchy" is because the VFO pot shaft has very, very little resistence to rotation. It is very easy to disturb the pot setting when you remove your fingers from the knob. The results from this are just more apparent for the 17 kHz/turn option, but I'd consider it objectionable even if I were using the lower option. Fortunately, the problem of too little VFO shaft turn resistence is easily fixed by putting some home-cut thin felt "washers" between the back of the VFO knob and the front panel. The "150 kHz" option allows: (1) WWV at 10 MHz to be tuned on the 30m band, (2) Greater coverage of what remains of the CW segments, (3) Cross-mode (CW-LSB) contacts in the 40m band. The K1 receiver functions in LSB mode on all bands. There is now considerable overlap of K1 coverage into the 40m LSB phone band. PS: Did you resolve the issue of the "extra" 100k-ohm resistor? PPS: I've found the months of K3 delivery schedule grumbling amusing. I ordered and paid for my K1 after it was first shown at Dayton in May 2000. Delivery finally happened in late November 2000. I don't remember anyone complaining about that six-month K1 inital delivery delay, even though the K1 is far far less complex than a K3. It was worth every second of the wait! 73, Mike / KK5F K1 SN 175 _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
