KX4O 1B-Battery VA Field Day 2015

The 20m AHVD and 40m small loop antennas during KX4O 1B VA field day.

Despite a weak battery and few contacts, our 1B-Battery effort verifies a 40m small-loop and packet-radio NTS messaging using quick deploy antennas.

Alternate Power Bonus for Field Day

Bonus points are important for the annual ARRL Field Day event in June.

If you are thinking of participating in your local club’s Field Day festivities or are heading to the campground with your family for a Bravo station, bonus points are available.

One of my favorites is the Alternate Power Field Day bonus.

To quote the ARRL Field Day rules for 2009…

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An HF Amplifier for your QRP Rig

During our Sunday night Tech Net in Northern Virginia one of the participants described a 140 watt amplifier he just finished building for use on the HF bands.

My immediate thought was “Hmmm, he already has a 100 watt style typical HF radio. Why does he need something that does 140 watts?”

The I remembered he also has a QRP rig which generates the typical 5 watts or so and this linear amplifier allows this QRP rig to be just like the typical 100 watt radios when you need or want it.

The amplifier concept comes from a company called…

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New QRP Radio Now Includes Spiffy Case

QRPKits.com has introduced the next model of their famous DC-xx series, the DX-xxB where xx = 20, 30 or 40 meters.

These are single frequency QRP units that are easy to build and fun.

The QRPeanut Can transceiver featured on HamHelpDesk uses a DC-40A unit.

This easy to build QRP transceiver is a single channel direct conversion crystal controlled assembly available for use with CW.

All you need to add is antenna, keyer, headphones and power. An antenna matcher makes good sense too.

Improvements include:

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QRPeanut Can Transceiver

Last fall I purchased a QRPKits.com DC40A QRP transceiver. At around $40 it is a no brainer purchase for any kit builder attempting to keep in practice. I really wanted to try an Elecraft, but budgets are budgets. I have my main rig now so I finally decided to take the built and tested DC40A board and house it. During testing I soldered a piece of coax straight to the antenna points on the board. The center conductor broke at the board pretty quick. I was motivated to tie that antenna signal to a bulkhead BNC.

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