With the unseasonal windy conditions the cobweb has been at “half-mast” for nearly ten days, so I have been slightly limited on the higher bands.
However it didn’t stop me in getting a rare contact from Greenland the other day on 17 meters, a German station OX/DL3GCS. I’m beginning to enjoy searching around for the DX stations and have started to use various websites to see what’s about. There is definitely a challenge to see if you can find and work a particular station and I am certainly getting the bug.
Since I cannot afford to splash out on a K3 I have been looking at what other kits are available. When my FL2000B needed repair I really enjoyed getting stuck in to tinkering and the soldering, the fiddling of internal parts was further developed when I added the filters and CW extras for the FT1000MP V.
The last kit I built was a long time ago sometime back in the 90s, it was a small Howes receiver which was great fun and fairly easy to build. So I have been searching around to see what QRP kits are about and I have come across a few nice little kits that seem fairly easy to build.
One that takes my fancy is the Kanga Foxx-3 transceiver …..and get this, its price is £29.95, can you believe that? Ok it’s not going to be the bee’s knees but it does get out and it has some reasonable reviews and I can build it for 30 meters.
The other kit I quite fancy building is the Brue CW transceiver from Walfords which is priced at the princely sum of £44. Output of the Brue is 1.5 watts but you can build a small RF linear amp to get it up to 10 watts, it’s usually set up for 80 meters but it can also be set to 30 meters using crystals.
So to start with I’m going to buy the Kanga Foxx-3 transceiver and see how I get on, of course I will publish all the details with how I progress on the blog, wish me luck.
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