News & Site Updates

10 May 2008 – A recent Reflector post by Don Wilhelm (W3FPR) prompted us to issue app note #5 entitled “IMA: When Not to Apply External Bias”.  This information may be of interest to you even if you do not have our K2 Internal Mic Adaptor (IMA).

13 April 2008 – Coinciding with the 3rd anniversary of the event that kick-start­ed our K2 af­ter­mar­ket ac­ces­sory part­ner­ship, we have com­ple­ted a total re­write of our web­site’s underlying Cas­cad­ing Sty­le Sheets (CSS) code which con­trols pre­sen­ta­tion at­tri­butes af­fect­ing lay­out, back­ground col­ors, bord­ers, fonts, and the be­hav­ior of hypertext links.  Some of the vis­ible chang­es re­sult­ing from this up­date are …

• More consistent appearance across multiple web browsers, especially:
  1. Firefox
  2. Opera
  3. MSIE 7
• Link mouseover and visited (state) improvements and additions:
  • Nicer text link effects, including highlighting until visited.
  • Flicker-free navigation button (binoculars, logo, compass) animation.
  • Added subtle on hover (dotted border) effect for images.
• Improved alignment of nested numbered and bulleted lists.
• MSIE 7 now supports setting the background color of HTML fieldset elements.
• Better behavior of MSIE 6 and MSIE 7 when changing font size.

7 March 2008 – Recently one of our customers mentioned that our website lacked a beginner-level “start here” introduction to our rework-free “Option Ready” K2 assembly method.  While investigating this issue, we realized that our site has a considerable amount of information about our method and the parts kits that are required to implement it, but that the information is spread out over many pages.

We have added the Rework-Free K2 Assembly page to address both of these concerns:

1. A brief introductory Overview describes our method and its benefits.
   
   
2. A Quick Reference Guide has links to all of the relevant information on our site, and brief descriptions of how that information is applicable.
   For practice, you might try using the Quick Reference Guide to locate the Rework-Free Assembly Summary table from which the graphic at right was screen captured.  (Hint: You will find this table on page 4 of our Portable Document Format (PDF) downloadable Companion Guides.)

6 March 2008 – We have taken the following actions after learning of a second incident where one of our customers had mistakenly removed the spacer that’s built into the left edge of the IMA Mic Patch Panel board:

• Issued app note #4 entitled IMA: Do Not Remove the “Built-In” Spacer.
• Posted messages alerting users about this issue to:
  • Our unpcbs™ Yahoo! Group.
  • The Elecraft® Reflector.
• Renamed the “App Notes” webpage as “Critical App Notes!”.

15 February 2008 – The original wiring list in the K2 Internal Mic Adaptor (IMA) User’s Guide has been replaced with the more readable color-coded schematic diagram shown at right.  There have been several other recent additions to the guide including:

• A quick summary page showing all seven standard jumper configurations.
• A graphical presentation of the jumper selectable external bias resistance circuit.
• Two Ten-Tec mics and yet another Kenwood mic were added to our “known list”.  Currently more than 55 supported microphones are listed.

11 January 2008 – There’s a brief description of our K2 Internal Mic Adaptor (IMA) on page 62 of the February 2008 issue of QST magazine.  Since submitting this announcement for publication, our list of supported microphones has grown to over 55 models.  Free publicity like this helps us to keep our prices so low.  Thank you ARRL!

22 September 2007 – Here is a high resolution scan of our new K2 Internal Mic Adaptor (IMA) PCB.  This image shows both sides of two whole sheets, where each 0.900" × 2.800" sheet includes two distinct products.  (Combining two products together on a single sheet like this cut our manufacturing costs in half, enabling us to offer the IMA at a significantly lower price than would have been possible otherwise.)

16 August 2007 – Recently Elecraft, Inc. began shipping rev. G of their K2 Owner’s manual.  It incorporates the errata sheets for a small number of RoHS compliant surface mount parts which have been used in the K2 for quite a while.  Unfortunately, these changes to the manual affected the page number references in our original Companion Guide.

Our new Companion Guide II resolves this issue.  While creating this new “version two” of our Companion Guide for use with Elecraft’s new rev. G K2 manual, we also removed the material geared towards building older (pre-S/N 4060) K2s.

15 January 2007 – In his recent Reflector post, Wayne wrote: “If you’d prefer to minimize the amount of doc­u­men­ta­tion you have to deal with … stick with the Elecraft manuals.”  In address­ing this concern, we have com­pletely rewritten our Companion Guide to dra­mat­i­cally sim­plify the task of annotating your K2 manual.  This revised guide uses full-size marked up K2 manual pages, to clearly show changes to the assembly procedure.

9 December 2006 – If you are new to or rusty at soldering, we normally recommend you start out by building our un-module header kit plus several of Elecraft’s useful yet inexpensive mini-module kits.  This let’s you gain confidence and experience (with minimum risk) before starting on the considerably more challenging and expensive K2.  However, for an even less expensive place to start – while supplies last – we are essentially giving away a very simple “soldering practice kit”.  It retails for just 75 cents, and consists of one of our original rev. D PCBs, plus two each of the three resistors (i.e. six resistors in all) to populate the UN-KNB2 header.

We only have a limited supply of these kits, so please only request one if you feel you need practice even before attempting our un-module header kit.  That said, if you do get this practice kit, then we further recommend that you save it and use it to practice desoldering, in the event that PCB rework is ever necessary.  For this practice to be most valuable, you should wait to do it until the moment you need to rework something expensive!  This way the experience and confidence will still be fresh in mind.

If you damage any traces or plated-through holes while attempting to replace a resistor on this practice kit, then please consider obtaining the proper tools or requesting assistance from someone with more experience, before attempting to desolder parts from something as precious as your K2!

30 November 2006 – The Elecraft® Reflector

Gary and company have done a very professional job … Some builders will find them useful. …  It’s clear that builders can successfully complete the K2 using either method.

Here’s my recommendation:

• If the notion of plug-in substitutes for future options strongly appeals to you, and you don’t mind *carefully* following the additional set of instructions that comes with them, then by all means consider this method.
• If you’d prefer to minimize the amount of documentation you have to deal with … then stick with the Elecraft manuals.

Wayne Burdick, N6KR
principal designer of the K2

12 November 2006 – This announcement in QST magazine seems to imply that all that’s required to build an “Option Ready” K2 is a set of un-module headers.  On the contrary, this is only true if you start out by purchasing a fully loaded QRP or QRO K2, i.e. one with all possible internal options.  For those of you starting out with just the bare or an only partially loaded K2, we also offer upgrade kits with all of the additional K2 parts you’ll need. 

In the time since this announce­ment was sub­mit­ted for pub­li­ca­tion, the pop­u­lar­ity of our option bypass headers kit has enabled us to lower its pro­duc­tion costs and retail price.  Prices now start at $5.25 for just the bare board, while a com­plete kit of parts with printed man­ual is $12.70.

9 August 2006 – This x-ray view CAD rendering highlights the dual ground planes on our new rev. G option bypass headers circuit board.

4 August 2006 – We created rev. G for K2’s operating with headers permanently installed.  This updated board incorporates suggestions from users on three continents:

• dual ground planes (N8LP)
• UN-KNB2 mounting hole (LU5OM)
• center ground pad for EU ceramic filter 40m BPF mod (DF7TH)

Other improvements include: shorter signal paths, bottom silkscreen, and an integral connector separation tool.