Yesterday I paid a visit to a firnd, Giancarlo I3GKK, who was very worried about an accident happened 3 days ago. Suddenly, during a brief tx period (10 seconds) at 100 W into a Windom antenna, he saw smoke coming out from the top panel of his K3. Since then no power out on all bands (measured with an external wattmeter). The internal wattmeter of the K3 reads correctly and the supply current is regular, on both high and low power, so it seems that the TX stages are ok. Looking into the area for smoky parts I found that L10 (96 nH), at the output of the KAT3 unit is badly burned. The enamel on the wire is gone and with the ohmmeter the inductance measures more than 7 ohms :-/ My guess is that SWR was a little too high, but within the tuning range of the KAT3. It was raining heavily when the fault has occoured. Measured the antenna with the MFJ-259B and it seems almost ok on all bands (less than 2 in the worst band, all the others less than 1.4). Anyone have had similar experiences?
73 de Giulio IW3HVB ______________________________________________________________ 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
