so i've been putting this off forever but i finally took my little KX2 out to a state park saturday and just spent a few hours calling CQ and making contacts on 20m. honestly wasnt sure what to expect since i'm used to running 100w at home with a decent antenna, figured QRP would be super frustrating.

ended up making like 8 contacts in about 2 hours which doesnt sound like a lot but man the whole experience was just different. had a nice long ragchew with a guy in georgia who said my signal was solid, running 5 watts into a random wire i threw up in a tree. its hard to describe but there's something really satisfying about knowing you're doing more with less i guess.

anyway i'm already thinking about building my own rig. i've been eyeing the various kits out there — the ubitx, some of the smaller cw kits. anyone have experience building from scratch vs buying a kit vs just getting something like the KX3 or whatever? i'm not afraid of soldering but i've never done an RF kit before, mostly just done audio stuff. wondering how big of a leap that is.

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. seriously though building your own QRP rig is one of those things that just completely changes how you think about radio. i started with a 40m DC receiver kit years ago, just to get comfortable, then moved on to a full transceiver build. the leap from audio to RF isn't as scary as people make it out to be as long as you're patient and dont skip steps when troubleshooting.

if you want to ease in i'd honestly recommend starting with something like a 40m CW kit, there's several out there in the 30-50 dollar range. you learn a ton about how a simple superhet or direct conversion rig works, and if somethings not right you have enough of a foundation to figure out where things went wrong. the ubitx is fun but its a bigger project and the community support is kind of scattered now since the company changed direction a bit. still doable just maybe not the first thing you build.

that 8 contacts on 5w sounds great by the way. once you start chasing efficiency like that its hard to go back to just cranking up the power.

the KX2 is such a nice little rig for portable ops, good choice. i take mine out for SOTA activations and its been rock solid. one thing i'll say about the whole building vs buying thing — i built a pixie kit just to say i did it and while the radio itself is kind of a toy it really did teach me a lot and cost almost nothing. now i kinda understand what's actually happening inside the box which makes the KX2 make more sense to me too if that makes sense.