Month: July 2009

Elecraft K2 Building Tips

OK so I decided to buy the base K2 kit and build it along with my son.

Choosing Elecraft is a no brainer, but any of the other kit manufacturers would be fine also. The point it to give a young man an opportunity to see something start from a box of parts and become a higher level assembly.

We are also considering the Elecraft KX1 as a good starter kit. We have already built several of the other smaller Elecraft kits.

Here is a summary of our current situation…

  • I have read the various FAQs, tips, etc.
  • I am not new to kit building.
  • We have a good soldering station.
  • If the K2 works out well we will use it on CW for a while and then add
    enhancements: SSB first then others (perhaps DSP, 160M, 60M-Xvrter,
    100Watts)…
  • Are there tools or tips I am missing before I drop the coin?

The summary of the very helpful answers are…

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Field Day Lessons Learned and Future Requirements

Our Field Day in Virginia was pretty decent this year. We had plenty of visitors responding to our newspaper notice. Several folks took a turn at the Get On The Air (GOTA) station.

However, we always forget some obvious items every year.

The lessons learned from sunshine related issues are obvious. We forgot ways to shade them again this year because we got so busy with other preparation details.

Here are a few lessons learned from our Field Day written in the form of system requirements.

  1. The network routers shall be set to one fixed speed rather than auto-negotiate the speed to keep the network connections more seamless.
  2. The network routers should have their speed set to the minimum speed of 1 Mbps to provide the best sensitivity (this is plenty fast enough for the meager network needs with the N3FJP software).
  3. The network routers should have their RF output power set to below the maximum (250 mW for the Linksys WRT54G running DD-WRT) if the Field Day site is hot
  4. All network nodes shall use static IP addresses.
  5. Network nodes shall not use DHCP addresses.
  6. The Network shall not use domain or host names.
  7. The radios shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.
  8. The computers shall be protected from direct sunshine at all times.

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