29 July 1999: It's Here! It's Here!

I got an email on Tuesday, 27 May 1999 from the good folks at Elecraft saying that my K2 kit would be shipping "today or tomorrow." I was almost resigned to the fact that my kit would not arrive until the following Monday, allowing for the thing to be put into UPS on Weds and a normal 3-day delivery time. But imagine my delight on Thursday, 29 May when I came home and found a USPS Priority Mail package waiting for me at 6pm.

It was Christmas in July at the KC5ZYC homestead. The wrapping was torn off within seconds but I had the presence of mind to start reading the manual and errata sheets first. I carefully read through the errata sheets and corrected the instructions. I had a few other things to do, but sometime around 7pm (having completely forgotten about the trifling matter of eating dinner) I began the laborious task of the full inventory. There are many, many parts to the K2, all neatly divided into bags for the various boards.

Peeve: Not that this has anything to do with this kit, but what blown-brain decided to make resistors labeled with color bands that are so close in color? I mean, violet and black and brown all look kinda the same when they're on really, really, REALLY small resistors. With the aid of a magnifying glass, however, I was able to sort and count all of the resistors in the kit. Yeesh. The caps were a bear without the magnifying glass, too. Sigh. I'm not supposed to feel old at my age.

Finished the inventory at about 9pm --- I got a phone call in the middle and that slowed me down, but not much: the person at the end of the line had to endure hearing me count large numbers of red monolithic caps in between thoughts.

I hadn't planned to start melting solder tonight, but I did anyway. Started stuffing the control board at 9:30.

The control board is complete at midnight. I decide that this is a good night's work, but spend an hour decompressing in front of the idiot box. At about 1am, however, I hear the siren's call of the little bags of parts saying "assemble me! assemble me!" Since I hadn't taken the precaution of stopping my ears and having the crew tie me to the mast I am powerless to resist.

At 6:30am, just as the sun is brightening the sky, I pry my eyes from the nearly-complete front panel board and say "Enough!" I'm at a point where I need to install the optical coupler for the VFO control, and it involves wrapping bare wires around tiny posts. I'll save it for when I can actually keep my eyes opened and focused.

30 July 1999:

I have the day off today, and am able to sleep in 'till 9:30, when my YL shows up for coffee and emergency car repairs. I am not able to return to the rig until after lunch, but I do get the front panel completed. A few resistance checks and one bad solder joint later both the control and front panel boards are checked out and happy.

31 July 1999

Began stuffing the RF board today. Only have a few hours to work on it, as the YL is moving into a new house and I am helping move appliances. I only get the latching relays installed.

1 August 1999

Finished the Part I RF board assembly and put the whole thing together for the Part I testing. The machine powers up and I take the controls through what little features are available at this point. The function counter works, the displays work, and I can calibrate the S-meter. WHEE!

Late tonight I begin stuffing the Part II (40M/Rcvr) RF board components. I get the resistors, diodes and varactor diodes installed before I peter out for the weekend.

2 August 1999

Once again the siren's call catches me after work at about 7. I finish stuffing the Part II assembly at about 2am. I spend the next two hours trying to figure out why I can't hear signals or even any atmospheric noise when I connect my cheesy MFJ-1621 vertical antenna. Instead of concluding that it's the antenna and trying a different one (I have a 30m dipole, but it hadn't occured to me to use to receive on 40m), I conclude I have a problem in the low-pass or band-pass filters for 40m and resign myself to a night's signal tracing tomorrow.

3 August 1999

I pick up the pieces parts for the crystal oscillator I will need to do my signal tracing at a surplus store for a total of $4.50, plus a bunch of garbage at Radio Shack to make it a finished product (enclosure, perfboard, jacks, etc.) In the end I don't use any of the latter and just build the oscillator to work not to look pretty.

Immediately I discover that the 6.912MHz signal is coming right through and I can align the receiver Just Fine without doing any signal tracing. The light comes on, and I try to hook up my 30m dipole. Within seconds I am hearing some morse code QSOs, and a little while later I'm picking up SSB phone.

Since the receiver works after all, I started the Part III assembly at about 8:30 tonight. I stopped at 11:30, having gotten to the part where I need to wind toroids --- that'll take a while, and I'm not going to start that tonight.

4 August 1999

WOund all the toroids, wound the transformers, installed the power amp transistors and the heatsink. And then... ON TO FINAL ALIGNMENT! Aligned all of the transmitter pieces and it's putting out power on all bands through my dummy load. But it's two am, and it's time to quit for the night and not hook it up to an antenna for a real on-the-air test just yet.

Oh, and I noticed the backlight isn't working. Gonna have to look at the front panel board and see if the backlight diffuser is put in properly. Yeesh.

But on the whole, the RIG IS DONE and #398 will be on the air tomorrow!

9 August 1999

No, it wasn't on the air on 5 August, nor on 6, 7 or 8 August. My supposedly "tuned" 30m dipole was tuned using an SWR meter that didn't calibrate at 2W with my SST --- so I was basically guessing at the SWR on it. After a few quick, useless attempts to improve it I gave up on the 5th. THen I went camping, and didn't get to operate. But tonight I tore apart the 30m dipole, tuned it (almost) for 20m and started listening near the QRP calling frequency. Returned the first CQ I heard and K3DEN and I had a painful QSO at 3:30UTC --- the QSB was bad and he had a real hard time copying me. I could copy him but only sporadically, so we just exchanged calls and RST. I got his QTH but I don't think he got mine. Still, a 1700 mile contact with 2W on the first try during the time when 20m was supposed to be closed on that path? I'm happy. I wasn't able to raise anyone else tonight. I know that my quickly tuned 20m dipole isn't very good, and I'll work more on it tomorrow. It was getting dark as I got the thing down below 3:1 SWR.