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By John Harper AE5X, March 11, 2010 12:04 pm

All sold!

Spring cleaning! Whatever doesn’t sell will go to the ‘Bay.

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By John Harper AE5X, March 10, 2010 6:59 pm

Gigatronics 2420M

I have a few issues regarding the K3 but they are in the process of being resolved by Elecraft’s excellent tech support.

First were the A/B tests with my FT840. I made the initial Receiver Gain calibration using factory defaults via the K3 Utility software. This produced receiver results that were inferior to my FT840 – a definite cause for concern. I made a video of the tests on several different bands and forwarded the video to Elecraft who agreed with me about the results. Continue reading 'K3 comes to life slowly'»

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By John Harper AE5X, March 8, 2010 11:19 pm

The K3 is almost finished. All that’s left to do is install the 100-watt PA and the fans. As a QRP rig, it is complete and I’ve had two QSOs with it. Continue reading 'K3 completed to QRP stage'»

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By John Harper AE5X,

Years ago, a posting to QRP-L announced an upcoming kit that was gonna kick ass and take names on 20-meter CW.

Its virtues were extolled far and wide. Terms like “bullet-proof front-end” were tossed around. It was a soon-to-be-legend. It was gonna be the subject of a Ken Burns documentary (just kidding). It was going to launch a new line of QRP kits and the company producing them.

It was the Norcal 20.

It was a dud.

Nothing wrong with it being a dud, mind you – that ain’t the point here. Continue reading 'The business end of QRP'»

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By John Harper AE5X, March 4, 2010 4:51 pm

If you haven’t seen an unassembled K3 yet, here it is:

…..five small boxes. The white box contains the 400 Hz filter.

The missus and I are driving down to XE for a few days so I won’t have time to assemble it anytime soon. Soon after we get back I’ll see what all the fuss is about with this thing.

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By John Harper AE5X, March 3, 2010 10:27 pm

As an 8-year old kid, I wanted to be Neil Armstrong. I’d ‘a given anything to have been the guy stepping off the LEM that July day back in 1969.

When he said, “Houston, Tranquility Base here – the Eagle has landed,” a lot of people had a lot of profound thoughts but I know I was the only person in the world to think, “Holy cow, he just worked a W5 from 238,000 miles away!” Continue reading 'Neil was a DXer…but not a QRPer'»

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By John Harper AE5X, March 1, 2010 8:09 pm

I’ve always wanted to work DXCC-CW  with a single QRP rig and a dipole.

The goal with my new Index Labs QRP+ (received today from Mike NA1XX) is to put it to work doing just that, with an 80m dipole fed with 450-ohm ladder line. Continue reading 'A DX goal'»

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By John Harper AE5X,

A classic can be defined as something that’s the best of its kind and no longer available. There are other definitions, most of which usually require the object under scrutiny to be from a bygone era.

Making matters murkier, there is bound to be disagreement of which specific items within a category qualify as classics.

The classic ham radios have been listed, blogged about and traded on eBay with the classic verbiage no doubt adding (successfully or not) to their asking price.

But what are the future classics? What might they be? Continue reading 'What are the future classics?'»

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By John Harper AE5X, February 28, 2010 4:10 pm

I commented in my results of the ARRL International DX Contest about not having my old Index Labs QRP+ anymore.

Thanks to Mike NA1XX, I now have one on the way. Continue reading 'End of month miscellany'»

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By John Harper AE5X, February 25, 2010 8:12 pm

Fort Tuthill QRP rig

I took advantage of having the day off and finally finished up this nifty little rig.

The build went great. No problems at all. I ended up removing 3 turns from L9 and now have the rig tuned for 3523-3568 kHz.

It’s currently burning in as recommended but I just got off the air having finally installed it into a case. Called CQ…no answer. So I tuned around till I heard a CQ which I then answered from Josh 6Y5WJ down in Jamaica, mon. I think it’s a good omen for any new rig’s first contact to be DX! Josh was 579 and gave me 559. Continue reading 'Fort Tuthill 80 complete – 1st contact is DX!'»