so i've been wanting to do this for probably two years now and last weekend i finally got my act together and did it. built a pixie kit first just to get my feet wet, then spent a few weeks putting together a slightly more serious 40m CW transceiver from a design i found on one of the QRP forums. nothing fancy, LM386 audio amp, NE602 mixer, the usual stuff you see in these low parts count rigs.

took it out to the state park saturday morning with a wire antenna i threw up in a tree, maybe 25 feet at the apex, fed with some old RG-174 i had laying around. running 3 watts roughly, maybe a hair less. honestly wasnt sure i'd hear anything let alone make any contacts but within maybe 20 minutes i had a guy in ohio coming back to me, then later a contact down into tennessee. both solid copy, nothing special but i was just sitting on a picnic table with a battery i charged the night before and making contacts, felt pretty wild.

the rig has a little drift issue when it first warms up which i know is pretty common with these vfo designs, anybody have a good trick for stabilizing that faster? ive tried the npо caps on the oscillator but honestly im not sure i placed them in quite the right spot in the circuit.

congrats on getting out there and doing it, that's the best part of QRP honestly — just the simplicity of the whole thing. a picnic table and a wire in a tree and you're on the air, hard to beat that.

the drift thing is pretty classic with those designs. a couple things that helped me a lot — first, try to thermally isolate the oscillator section as much as you can, even just a little cardboard shield between it and any components that put out heat can make a difference. second, and this took me forever to figure out, make sure your supply voltage to the oscillator is well regulated, even small ripple or sag can show up as drift especially early on. some guys use a little 78L05 just for the osc stage even if the rest of the rig runs off 12v or whatever. the NPO caps are the right idea but yeah placement really matters, they need to be in there where the temperature coefficient actually counteracts the drift direction, sometimes you have to experiment a bit and it feels like black magic.

this is making me want to finally build one of those michigan mighty mite kits ive had sitting in a drawer since like 2021 lol. did you have any trouble with the audio on yours, i've heard the LM386 can be kind of noisy if you're not careful about the layout