K2 - Night Five

Tonight after dinner and once the kids had headed off to bed I managed to spend about
another 90 minutes working the K2 project. I am now working on the main RF board.
There are a LOT of components on this board. As an example there are 17 relays to
install in one of the first steps of this section.

This board will probably take me several evenings unless I can find a 3 or 4 hour
block of time this weekend to dedicate to the project.



Working on the drywall project in the basement has been dominating much the weekend
time that is not spent with the family. The K2 seems to be more a week night project
once everyone heads to bed... I sneak downstairs to the work bench for 30-45 minutes
and melt solder.

K2 - Afternoon Five

The front panel & board are largely complete. The front now looks like a real
radio. I have to admit that the knobs are a little close together even for my small
fingers. It is clear that the design of this radio is to appeal to the portable/field
use as much or more than being the main stay of the shack.

I have now completed 32 of the 80 build pages of the manual. -That is pretty cool.

During the assembly of the front panel board I also added the Internal
Mic Adaptor mod from Rework Eliminator folks.

The radio is far enough along that I should probably post some pictures now that it
looks something like a radio. If time permits after support and family game night
I would like to start working on the main RF board in section 6 of the book.

K2 - Night Four

I managed to squeeze in about 75 minutes of assembly time in tonight. The board for the front panel controls is now complete. The next step is adding the SSB parts to front panel and the mic adapter kit.



I would not even have the SSB option kit except for the fact this radio will be the
IF rig for some of my transverters. Otherwise it would be a QRP CW rig for me.



Tonight's assembly was pretty straight forward. I will need to try to take some more
pictures if/when time permits. It was very relaxing to melt some solder and follow
the assembly instructions.

K2 - Build Night Three

After the boys went to bed (it is a school night... lights out by 8:30p) I went down
to work bench to melt some solder. I have the control board finished up.

Of course when I went to validate all of the test points with my DMM... the batteries
are toast and I don't have any spares. I had to fall back to an older Fluke bench
model DMM. I don't really trust the older Fluke because I picked up used and I have
not built relationship with it yet.



The point of validating the test points in this step is to look for shorts in the
soldering at some key points. There do not appear to be any shorts... but some of
the values do not match what the book says.



I am going to take this with a grain of salt until the real check out phase of the
control board later on. (By then I will have some new or rechargeable batteries in
my main DMM)

I have to say that it was a blast being able to spend an hour or so working the K2
kit project tonight. It will probably be Saturday or Sunday before I can get back
to project as we have family plans for Friday night.



I am trying to make this a more regular project every night or every other night.
(Otherwise it will never get done.) I would really like to have this on the air for
Field Day. Better yet, I would like to have this done so it can start driving my VHF/UHF
transverters which is it's real purpose in the life.



(I will try to post some pictures this weekend if time permits.)

Building the K2 - Night Two

I spent about 45 minutes working on the K2 tonight. I am working on the control board. I am a little confused about jumpers for R18 & R19. I just sent an email to the Elecraft mail reflector asking for some clarification.



I think that I have 12 parts left to apply to this board and then it is complete...
then I can start the next board.



I have not been working on the K2 project recently... most of my spare time has been
spent working on drywall in my basement or trying to get VP6DX in the log on as many
bands as possible.

K2 project has started

I melted solder tonight.

I spent about 30 minutes organizing the MISC and Control Board parts bags into my
parts bins to make things easier.

I then started building the Control Board for the K2. I have about 60 components
on the board so far which took about 90 minutes. I would guess that I am about 60-60%
complete on this board. Most of the remaining pieces are chips & sockets + a few
capacitors.



I will try to post some pictures later if time permits. So far my experience with
the Elecraft kits has been excellent. (My first kit was a XV222 transverter.)

The K2 Project Begins

Instead of watching the Super Bowl I cleaned off the top of my work bench to get ready
for a new project. I then spent an hour putting the errata notes into the instruction
manual.



I am getting ready to start building my Elecraft
K2.

It is almost time for dinner. I think that I feel like taking a nap instead of
watching the second half of the football game. 

K2 on the way

I pulled the trigger on ordering an Elecraft K2
yesterday.

This will be a pretty cool project. It will configured for HF QRP and will also
be driving my VHF/UHF transverters.