Hi All, I have more information on this. I finished as NCS for the TX MARS net last night at 7:58 PM CT on about 3.2 MHz. The Mic gain functioned as I described in the previous email below. At 7:58 the Mic gain was set at 15 when I left the radio on to monitor the Oklahoma net on the same frequency at 8:01 pm. I was listening to the excellent audio from across the room. ;o)
At 8:30 pm I heard a station I needed to contact so I went back to the radio. With the controls untouched, I called to check into the net. My output showed on the K3 at about 35 Watts again. When the NCS heard me I started transmitting and about 20 seconds after, I was back at 100 Watts. So now I am wondering if it has anything to do with temperature, or perhaps software temperature compensation. I do not have an external wattmeter installed for comparison purposes. I can try to do that, but it will take me some time to calibrate my old meter to confirm its approximate accuracy. Also I have not done the new auto power calibration in the new firmware yet as I know my dummy load is off by about 10%. Please any advice. Once again I must stress that the K3 is still performing very well. I was not supposed to be NCS last nite, but since I once again had the best signal in TX I was asked to take over the net (thanks to the K3). K3 #2080 is getting a nice reputation here in TX Army MARS. Steve, AAR6CX, W2MY ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- -----Original Message----- From: list1 [mailto:li...@pituch.net] Sent: Friday, January 16, 2009 8:20 PM To: Elecraft; Bob Cunnings Subject: RE:Mic Gain Changing Hi Bob and All, I got home and did USB NCS duties tonite on MARS so I have a little more information. It seems that when I first start transmitting even at a MIC gain of 25, I only initially get about 30 to 60 Watts of power out. If the Mic gain is 15 it is more like 35 Watts. If I keep the Mic gain set at 25 and just start talking while starting the net the power out keeps increasing for about 30 seconds until it is at about 100 Watts. The ALC is about 6 bars. At this point I can turn the Mic gain down to 2 and still get 100 Watts out and have an ALC of 6 bars. This is all done when the compression is set to 15 and is never changed. It is funny but we had to go from the operating frequency at about 3.2 MHz to about 2.3 MHz tonite. We did not have propagation at 2.3 MHz so we immediately went back to 3.2 MHz. I had to press the tune button to put a signal out at 5 W to tune the manual tuner as I always do. The Mic gain was still set to 25. However when I started talking I was putting out only about 35 W, so I just kept talking and the power rose to about 100 W again in about 30 seconds. Once again when I dropped the Mic gain down to 2, I still had 6 bars of ALC and 100 Watts out. Thats why I said that the ALC thing with the K3 was not critical and seemed to be self adjusting. Its just that I don't think my K3 #2080 is operating correctly. By the way I still get raving reports. I am heard with the K3 much better than the TS480. But I never used the processor with the TS480 so its apples and oranges until I do more tests with the TS480. Steve, W2MY _______________________________________________ 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
