Ham Radio

In June last year, when I talked to Hans, G0UPL, ordering his QCX kit at his booth at the Ham Radio fair in Friedrichshafen, he mentioned that there would be a 50 W PA kit coming out soon, and that stuck with me. Meanwhile, I noticed indeed that QRP is just no fun when no one is answering your calls—sorry for having to say this. I like to think of this as a kind of “Law of the Conservation of Effort”: If a DX contact is established, and one of the stations is QRP, then the other one is doing all the work and effort (in terms of operating a respectable receiving antenna and/or “having to crawl into the speaker”). Well, thinking of my main goals that led me to the QCX, which were

• assembling a TRX completely on my own,
• getting a lightweight TRX, no matter its power,
• having it only support CW,

wouldn’t there be a better follow-up step than

• assembling a PA kit,
• a lightweight PA such that QRP is no longer an option (hi),
• having it only support CW (not sure about this, though, but at least it’s marketed as “the QCX PA”).

So, I kept close eyes on the QRP Labs site in the recent months for signs about that PA, and finally, at the beginning of December, Hans announced that PA on the mailing list, and only about one hour later my order was through. I was one of the lucky ones that could include his enclosure kit before it went out of stock.

QCX mods

While I waited for the kit to arrive, I had time for preparation: The QCX needed a PTT mod to be able to provide a PTT signal to the PA; this is achieved by patching a stereo jack into the circuits (plus creating an outlet in the QCX’s enclosure) and adding a pull-up resistor. I also flashed the latest firmware release using an Arduino Uno as programming device, which might be a topic for a different blog post. The harder question to answer was how to get a cheap but still qualitative 20 V 5 A power supply for the PA. Luckily, I already possessed the Lenovo UltraSlim 90 W (20 V 4.5 A) notebook travel power adapter, which even included the option to use a wall socket or a standard automobile 12 V plug. Therefore, I could even go from a standard 12 V lead-acid battery. I only needed a non-standard DC barrel adapter, which took some extra time to arrive. While I was at it, I purchased a 3S LiPo battery pack with nominal 11.1 V to power the QCX itself with something lightweight; note that I measured up to 13.1 V fully charged, so using a fresh 4S pack might fry the QCX.

The PA kit arrived after Christmas, and I was again looking forward to the assembly process, which promised to be not as lengthy as that for the QCX. It took me about ten hours nonetheless, mainly due to assuming errors where there had been none. I will now go over some specialties that I had encountered during the assembly.