I finally had some time to hook the K1 up to a real antenna. I gave 30 meters a whirl because that was where there was some transmit issues due to the wrong supplied toroid size, as well as the band where the periodic noise appeared to be the worse.
I had a nice QSO with John, YV5IUA on 10.114.0. No problem at all with 5 watts output. If the noise was present, I wasn’t able to hear it above the regular atmospheric noise, and it certainly did not color John’s received signal in any way. A QSO with Troy W4RPS on 14.039.8 followed, with similar success.
Two observations; upon installing the final metal covers, there was some slight shift in the VFO, and about 150 Hz shift in the transmit offset. In addition, the maximum power level has dropped down to 5 watts, but only because the built-in power meter is now reading about 2 watts high. In other words, it now thinks it is sending 7 watts, and reading 7 watts, but the reality is it is 5 out the connector. The RF meter parts are very close to the metal covers, as is the cap used to set the offset.
The final assembly and verification took another hour. So the total time for the complete K1 now stands at 27 hours.
