I’ve been a subscriber to the Elecraft mailing list for nearly two years now. As I’ve said before, I think it’s the best overall amateur radio mailling list that I subscribe to. I’ve always felt a little guilty, though, because I wasn’t operating an Elecraft product.
Well, I’m finally a real Elecrafter. Here’s the story…
For Christmas 2003, my wife bought me an Elecraft KX1 with the KXAT1 antenna tuner and 30m option. At first, I made good progress on it, quickly completing the receiver assembly steps.
Then, I hit a snag. I installed Q8, the AGC transistor backwards. I caught the mistake before I applied power, and was able to unsolder it and put it back in correctly. When I turned the receiver on, though, I couldn’t hear a whole lot, so I thought I might have damaged it.
Complicating the matter, was the fact that I didn’t really have a non-ferric tool that I could use to adjust the receiver’s trim capacitors. Without that tool, I couldn’t really tell if the problem was with the transistor or the adjustment. Frustrated, I set the kit aside, intending to take only a short break in construction, while finding the appropriate adjustment tool.
Well, that break was over a year. I kept meaning to get started again, but found excuse after excuse not to do it. To be fair, I am president of the local ham club as well as the affiliated club coordinator for the Michigan section, and those activities kept me pretty busy, but even so, just letting it lay there on the bench was not a good thing.
Finally, I made my mind up to do it. My goal was to have it complete by August 7, when I’d be leaving for a short vacation in Northern Michigan. The idea was to use it “up north” as we say here in Michigan.
Even then, I didn’t get started on the final assembly until the evening of Thursday, August 4. That evening, I hooked up my 40m dipole and wrapped some electrical tape around a jeweler’s screwdrive to set the trimmer capacitors.
When I did these two things, the KX1 seemed to come alive. I could hear quite a few signals on 40m, and on the 40m band at least, I could twiddle the caps and find peaks.
Emboldened by this turn of events, I plunged ahead with the construction, and by early Friday evening, I had complete the construction of the transmitter. Of course, this, too, was not without incident.
I managed to install the power transistor incorrectly, which required that I remove it and re-install it. I discovered this when I made the resistance from the tab of the transistor to ground in Alignment and Test – Part III. The problem was that, in my hasted, I left off the shoulder washer. This not only caused the tab to short to ground, but also meant that I’d soldered the leads of the transistor too short. It probably took me an hour to get that all straightened out.
The good news was that it actually seemed to work. After running through the transmit checks, I hooked up the dipole and actually made a contact with WD0K in Little Canada, MN. What a rush that was! At that point, it was getting pretty late, but I did want to get a start on the antenna tuner. Before turning in, I installed all seven relays and the IC socket.
The next morning, I finished building the antenna tuner, and believe it or not, it worked like a charm. After running through alignment procedure, I again hooked up the dipole and worked a station in Missouri. I buttoned it up, threw a bunch of tools and some antenna wire into a plastic toolchest and headed up north for my vacation.
Out in the Field
Late Saturday night–after dinner and a wonderful fireworks display in the town of Elk Rapids–I got out the radio, put in six batteries, and fired it up. I heard a loud buzzing, and the bAtLo display. I played around with it a bit, but I neglected to pack a voltmeter, so I couldn’t check to see if the battery voltage was low or not. Since it was late, I decided just to pack it in for the night.
Sunday, the day was filled with various outdoor activities and talking with my brothers and sisters, so I didn’t get back to the radio until after dinner. I was able to borrow a voltmeter from someone else staying in the cabins and measured the voltage coming from the battery pack. Fortunately, there did not seem to be a problem with the battery pack.
Reading through the manual, I discovered that the low battery voltage is programmable. Navigating to that manual, I found that the default value is 10.5V, which is an appropriate setting when operating the KX1 from a 12V supply. Setting it to 7.5V, a more appropriate value for battery operation, corrected my problem with with the bAtLo display.
Improvising an Antenna
The next step was to make an antenna. The antenna tuner manual suggests a random wire antenna consisting of a 24-28-ft. driven element and a 16-ft. counterpoise. On the Elecraft mailing list, many suggested using a BNC-binding posts adapter to connect these wires to the radio.
Since I hadn’t thought about purchasing one beforehand, I had to improvise. I made one by cutting off one end of a BNC jumper cable, stripping back the jacket, and connecting the two conductors to a terminal strip. After measuring the appropriate lengths of wire, I connected them to the terminals. I threaded the wires through the screen of porch and ran the driven element out horizontally to the clothes line.
While this setup seemed to work pretty well for receive, it did not work all that well for transmitting. The wire was less than 10-ft. off the ground, and the tuner could never achieve less than a 1.5:1 SWR, with the readings averaging about 1.8:1.
I reasoned I would get better results if I could get the wire up into a pine tree, situated just outside the porch. This was indeed true. Using a post used to support the clothes line, I was able to string the wire up about 15 feet, and at that point, was able to get the SWR down below 1.5:1 on nearly all frequencies.
Of course, a low SWR does not mean lots of contacts. That first evening, the band seemed to be in good shape as I was hearing lots of stations, but none of the stations I called could hear me. I did finally manage to make a contact, though–VP5/K4SV in the Turks and Caicos Islands. It was rough, and I had to send my call nearly a dozen times before it was copied correctly, but thankfully Dave stayed with me and finally got it correctly. Thanks, Dave!
By that time, it was pretty late, and the batteries were run down, so I called it a night.
The next morning, I installed some new batteries and again got on the air. It didn’t take long to make a contact this time. I heard Jerry, W8GND, who lives just down the road from my home QTH, calling CQ, and he came right back to me when I responded. Unfortunately, things got worse from there, and after the first exchange, we were not able to continue the QSO.
I had better luck with the next contact, K4NAX in Indianapolis. He gave me a 559 report, and we had two exchanges before the QSB got me. At that point, it was time to pursue some other vacation activities.
I got on the air again that night and made three contacts, but unfortunately, they were all rather short. After establishing contact, QSB set in and the other station was unable to copy me. At 11 pm, I went QRT.
In thinking about this, I think my problem maintaining contacts was the result of poor antenna placement and low power. I’m going to have to think of a way to get the antenna more vertical and in a straight line. As for increasing the power, I have a 12V battery pack that I’m going to experiment with on my next field trip. I just didn’t have enough time on this trip to get that battery charged and available. If I’d have 4W instead of 1.5W (or less), I think I’d’ have done better.
Wrapping it Up
Overall, I’d guesstimate that I spent 20 hours building the KX1 so far, and I still need a couple of hours to build the 30m board. That’s not bad considering some of the mistakes I made.
Things seem to be working as advertised, too. Although I’m still not sure about the receiver alignment, one of the guys in our club has a service monitor, and I’ll be taking it over to his house to do some final tweaking on it.
I’m sure that with my friend’s help, and with the help of the great guys on the Elecraft mailling list, I’m going to have this thing working like a champ. This is going to be a lot of fun.
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