Last night I unboxed the President Mckinley and hooked it up to the PSU. The case for it is also attached to the bonding strip. I did some audio testing using both radios and everything sounded fine on both AM and SSB. I manually moved the antenna coax from one radio to the other. I did find one patch cable with a wonky connector so it was shown the door. I then added in the Diamond Antenna CX-210A coax switch so I could use the two radios with one antenna. According to Diamond, the signal rejection in this switch is good to use it this way. I bonded the switch case to the bonding bar. AM and SSB still sounded fine on both radios. Then I added the MFJ antenna tuner mainly to see what would happen. I bonded its case to the bonding bar. Once again, AM/SSB sounded fine on both radios and SWR was fine. By this point I had become quite annoyed with the location of the mic plug on the Mckinley and with the fussy controls. I'm sure it's fine one you get used to it. My problem is I usually either like something right away or I don't and things don't usually grow on me.
By now I had connected everything except the KL503HD amp, LP filter and power meter. So I bonded the amp case to the bonding bar and connected the amp directly between the Mckinley and antenna. No switch or tuner or Anytone was connected in any way.except through the bonding bar. The Anytone was powered on but nothing was connected to its coax jack. The Mckinley was showing about 5 watts AM output to start so I lowered it to two watts and tested AM. Listening to it via headphones connected to the Anytone it sounded okay on AM at this power level. I played with the modulation level and RF power a bit and was able to keep a clean sounding (if not exactly powerful) AM signal. If I turned the signal up above maybe 3 watts the voice in the Anytone was very fuzzy and hard to understand. That's a far cry from the "up to 30 watts"... Then I switched to SSB and no matter how low I set the RF power on the Mckinley, the output from the amp sounded absolutely horrible. I would not even call it distortion. More like a jumbled, garbled, non-continuous outpouring of verbal garbage. I think it may be safe to say that whatever part(s) of the KL503HD handle the SSB stuff are quite ill at the moment. It's also safe to say that my gamble/attempt to use this amp along with the Q5N2 with its power turned way down was a failure. Another lesson learned by me along life's path.
The last part of my experiment was to try a new KL203P I've had sitting in a box for about 5 months with the Mckinley. It was just radio to amp to antenna and the Kl203P case was bonded. I was able to turn the RF power down enough and set the modulation low enough to have the amp sound clear on both AM and SSB but I'm just not sure that the resulting power output level is worth it.
I am also not certain my new Powermax PM4-120 amp is working properly. I have no specific indication it isn't, I just can't prove it is. I swapped out a PM4-75 with the 120 when the 120 went on a good sale. I may bring the truck battery back downstairs again and re-run a few of my tests to eliminate the PSU as a potential source of the amp problems.
I do want to get the KL503HD fixed up so I can use it with a more appropriate radio but I have no idea where to send it for repairs. I don't want it gutted and steroided up to pump out 1 KW, just reliably working as is it supposed to with with the appropriate input level.
The best part about this process has been learning a whole lot about grounding and bonding that I applied to make my station better and a lot safer.
