pQRP

Last night I attended a very enjoyable gathering of the Pacific Northwest QRP (pQRP) group. I’ve been wishing for some time to find a group of like-minded hams. Like-minded, that is, in the sense that they are interested in design and building as well as operation. Imagine my pleasure at hearing from not one, but four hams involved in design projects as well as others enjoying the experimental side of the hobby, even down to one gentleman who is testing an add-on heat sink for his Elecraft KX-3.

Several members of the club are involved in designing and building a variant of Ashhar Farhan’s “Minima” transceiver. They are equipping it with Si570 oscillators and a comfortable user interface, while trying to stay close to the original spirit of the radio. A potentiometer is still the interface for frequency control, for example, instead of a rotary encoder.

Other members of the club are active in operating, including SOTA, RTTY contests, and other pursuits.

As show and tell, I brought along my NorCal 40A, which neither tunes as widely as it should nor outputs full power. So far it has stumped me. The consensus of the group was to post about it to the club mailing list and see who has some ideas to try.

I’m already looking forward to next month’s meeting.