K2 - Atop the Summit

May 7, 1998

By Conrad Weiss - NN6CW

I phoned Wayne Burdick / N6KR barely two weeks prior to Dayton ‘98 and found myself talking to his answering machine. I left him a message requesting an interview and a tour of the new K2 transceiver. When he called me back and offered a 90 minute preview of the K2 I grabbed my car keys and headed for his lab.

The K2, for the few who've not heard of it, is a new QRP multi-band kit from the US company, Elecraft, Aptos, CA - owned by Wayne Burdick and his long-time partner, Eric Swartz / WA6HHQ. Wayne explains that the K2 is a joint-effort utilizing Eric's talents in electrical engineering and financial wizardry combined with Wayne's passion for rapid-prototyping, component reduction and user-interface design. Their talents complement each other.

Wayne Burdick's designs are well-known and include the NorCal 40, the Sierra, the SST and now the K2. The K2 was first announced at Pacificon '97 to a standing-room only packed-house and it will now make its world debut at Dayton '98.

For those less familiar with Wayne, his designs began at age 13 when he worked a 200-mile QSO on a "wad of 2N2222's smaller than a 9-volt battery" - a Burdick- design, naturally. He's been designing QRP transceivers ever since although his formal education is an eclectic blend of studies in Human Interface Design and Human Factors. Wayne feels that his unconventional education - from an RF design perspective - coupled with his passion for QRP has given him a design philosophy that's atypical of a classically-schooled RF design engineer. He's a self-proclaimed environmentalist and minimalist and utterly beams when he talks of discoveries he's made enabling him to reduce parts-count or conserve energy. Given the time, he could expound for hours on the topic of making common transistors do double-duty in RF circuit design. With hundreds of QRP back-packers carrying his minuscule "SST" to the pinnacle of their own distant mountain, there's more to Burdick's design philosophy than mere talk. He's proven his philosophy commercially viable thus setting the stage to conquer K2.

In his lab, Wayne poured us each a glass of bottled water - pure crystalline glacial run-off -- devoid of any unnecessary minerals -- the extraneous components of common tap water. We chatted for a few minutes prior to beginning the ascent. Regarding transceiver design: he humbly says he's learned it the "hard-way" through countless experiments over many years in the lab playing at his beloved QRP hobby. He took me on a tour of his early prototypes that he keeps close at hand. I surveyed over a decade's-worth of transceivers - all well-crafted, handsome-looking projects - some that went on to commercial fame and, others that were "personal learning experiences." I surveyed his well-lit lab and it too was an exercise in minimalism no rack-mounts of H-P spectrum analyzers and the like - just a Tek scope, a couple of DMMs, a power supply and a few other little instruments.

Wayne explained that the roots of the K2 project stem from the sad demise of Heathkit's "Green Boxes" - among them, the HW-9 - which is actually brown in color - signaling the end of an era that Wayne Burdick intends to bring back to life. He says the K2 will offer the guy/gal who must roll their own, an evolution of what the HW-9 might have become had Heathkit remained in the kit business. Such a design would have to accommodate the elementary skills of the beginner and appeal to the advanced kit-builder as well. Beyond that, if the buyer is paying $549 for the CW-version of K2 it must deliver an unusually high level of performance and features to attract a market - especially amongst the ultra-price conscious QRP community -- a very difficult engineering challenge for any designer. Did Wayne and Eric manage to achieve their goal? Well, let's have a look.

First off, we had only 90 minutes to meet so we had to make the most of it. We started by carefully listening to the receiver - to me - the most important part of any transceiver design. We tuned around 7.040 MHZ - the 40 meter QRP watering hole and found several CW stations both weak and strong. The K2's tuning rate, audio quality and filtering was superb. Wayne wanted to show-off his choice of filters and we tightened-down on an average CW signal going from wide to medium to narrow. Narrow was ultra tight and yet I was amazed at the lack of "ringing" or "hollowness" present. It sounded as good as the best receivers I've used and considerably better than my own HW-9. Yet, in fairness, we didn't have the band conditions to fight a DX pile-up and go cheek-to-jowl with 100 other CW ops gunning for the station in Madagascar, so I'll have to suspend final judgment until contest conditions warrant more testing. We tuned in a couple of SSB stations, even though the SSB option board was not installed in the K2 at the time. It was equally nice sounding. It's a wonderful receiver and it should be great fun to really ring it out under more demanding band conditions.

Next, I wanted to check out the T/R switching time and CW break-in. We did some keying so I could get a feel for full break-in operation. It's certainly very fast, quiet and clean. I kept looking for faults and I wasn't finding them. I could have easily spent the next several hours working QSOs with the guys on 40 meters and, with the K2 running an embarrassing 22 watts of RF-out, we could have worked anything we heard I would imagine. (Wayne notes the K2 specifications are 10 watts PEP!) But I was already satisfied that the NorCal gang had established that the K2 is very capable of running QSOs so, I chose to move on to unexplored ground - the internals of the case-works, Wayne's philosophy re: the K2's options and how the K2 concept works as a "grab-and-go-all-in-one-transceiver."

Here we go: for $549 (US) you get the kit for the CW-ready version of the K2. The SSB board is an option -- as well as the 160-meter band kit. If you don't require SSB or 160 meters you don't pay for them. In addition, there are a host of internal options that are being considered for future release after the K2 is launched. These may include an internal 20 watt ATU (antenna tuning unit) and a 3AH internal gel cell battery. For the QRO operator who needs more power there may be an internal PA option (power amplifier) to crank the K2 up to some yet to be determined power level of 50-100 watts. There's even talk of an external PA, and an external hi-power ATU for the ham who needs that configuration. At this writing, those options are more of a twinkle in Wayne's eye than actual products. The primary mission is to get the base K2-CW version out the door to the QRP masses, then follow on with the rest of the goodies.

Wayne removed the top-cover of the K2 and explained how the options will fit inside the K2 case. As he lifted the top off I peered inside expecting to see a maze of boards, headers, interconnecting cables, and unexplainable complexity. Not true! The innards of the K2 more closely resemble the Grand Canyon rather than some enormously threatening mountain peak. By design, the K2 is a massive void inside. At the bottom of the "canyon" there's a big flat 7.5" x 7.5" main board that covers the entire floor of the case.

In front, there's the display board and the main controller board just behind it. The inside cavity has been left wide open to receive the internal 3AH gel cell and the ATU. Even with those in place there's still room for a top-firing speaker in the upper case cover. And on the main board there's space for the SSB option board, the 160-meter band kit - with separate BNC 160-meter receive antenna, and the optional noise blanker board.

Feature-wise, practically anything the serious QRPer could wish for is standard issue - direct entry keys, RIT, XIT, A/B VFOs, MEMs, A or B antenna switching, RF power out, Keyer speed, Keyer mems, AF gain, RF gain, Mic gain, Display lock, Mic connector and a segmented bar-graph S-meter/RF power /ALC meter. There are visual "annunciators" on the LCD main display that give you an instant visual status of all the control settings we commonly forget about - especially as beginners in the hobby. For example, you will always know if you are on "A or B" VFO, which antenna you are on ("A or B"), whether your Attenuator is on, whether your RIT or XIT is enabled, etc. This interface is truly Wayne's pride and joy. And, it certainly shows that he's put some long hours of design time into it. It's extremely intuitive.

As I'm writing this preview, I'm actually looking at my own model of the K2, a cardboard mock-up, I built for my own reference study. Nothing very secretive — I simply went to the Elecraft web site at: http://www.elecraft.com and took the K2's dimensions, did some rough calculations based on what I surmised from looking at the real K2 and installed my own mock-up gel cell and ATU options with appropriate weight factors. It's easy to knock out a quick weighted model of the K2, in corrugated board, complete with a laser-printed image of the front panel from the Elecraft web site. It's an interesting exercise and I would encourage anyone to try this. With the K2 model you can literally see and feel the volume, dimensions and weight of a fully-loaded K2 - about 5 pounds. This is Wayne's target weight for the K2 with the internal ATU and 3AH gel cell.

The fully-loaded K2 constitutes a complete QRP station. You'll need only paddles or mic and your antenna. Gone are the days of rounding up all your loose gel cells, the PL-259 interconnect coaxial cables, the SWR/WATT meter, the external ATU, an external keyer, external speaker and of course the canvas/plywood/plastic/titanium suitcase contraption that we've built to carry it all. The K2 offers the same functionality as the mountain of gadgets in your field kit - all in one elegant package just a bit larger than a basic Kenwood TS-50 or Icom-706-II - and those wouldn't have any internal batteries or ATUs. However, they would have some overly-greedy receive current demands to whittle your battery down to nothing in no time.

So, this raises the question as to how current-hungry the K2 is in receive mode. I asked Wayne to minimize the receive current, which he did by shutting off the backlight, "asking" the uP (microprocessor) to reduce the holding voltage on the non-latching bandswitch relays - fine as long as you stay on the same band - and he minimized the audio to the speaker yielding 122 ma. You can actually watch the receive current drop on the main display read-out as you use the main menu to toggle-off whatever features you wish to disable. You can actually read the descending receive current in milliamps as you do this! In addition, you can check your battery voltage or power source to see how your gel cell is holding up. And, this only covers about five percent of the functionality of the K2's display interface. Way cool!

Wayne explains that the documentation, construction, test and alignment will favor the beginning kit-builder in the same way that Heath once did. It will be a very non-threatening step-by-step construction process - all thru-hole components with big solder pads - and no SMTs.

The K2 has a built-in frequency counter function that will allow the builder to align the rig without a scope or other lab instruments. You can also add an additional BNC connector to the rear apron to use the frequency counter for taking other lab measurements - nice touch!

Suddenly the phone rang in Wayne's lab. It was Eric - who couldn't join us for the interview - informing Wayne that it was time to whisk the K2 off for final painting and silk-screening for Dayton. I wanted to stay and play but my 90 minutes were up - all too quickly.

Summary: Certainly, there's been a lot of speculation over whether Wayne and Eric could really pull this project off. I've heard some doomsayers claim the $549-mark is too high for the money-stingy QRP crowd. Others have ventured Wayne and Eric couldn't meet the target dates or prices. I can understand a certain amount of skepticism when you're looking at a project that's as radical as the K2. It comes with the territory when designers break new ground.

The guys at Elecraft have done their job and, they've done it extremely well. Indeed, Wayne took a 30-day sabbatical from his regular job in February to make sure the project would stay on course and maintain its schedule and target price.

While these writings are far from a real lab test, I can assure you that the K2 is for real! And, for 90 minutes I could not find any significant failing or shortfall in Wayne's design philosophy or the K2's performance. I found innovation, design brilliance and an elegant transceiver. I finally found great package-design that's been long overdue in rigs designed for QRP field operations. And, I found solid evidence of the untold hours of labor that the guys at Elecraft have poured into this project.

In a week from now when the K2 debuts at Dayton, I believe it will set a new standard of performance that will be overwhelmingly welcomed by the QRP community - even at $549 (US). It will invite many quality- conscious, do-it-yourself-hams to join us in this amazing sport of QRP kit-radio. And the rising tide of QRP newcomers will benefit all of the American and foreign QRP kit companies.

The K2 will be a Grand Slam Home Run.

72 - Conrad Weiss - NN6CW.

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Special thanks to Wayne Burdick and Eric Swartz of Elecraft for making this last-minute interview and demonstration of the K2 possible.

Standard disclaimers: I am not related in any way to Elecraft.

For further information contact Elecraft at: http://www.elecraft.com

This is an authorized reprint from the QRP-L reflector.