so i've been putting off building a QRP rig for probably two years now, always figured i'd mess it up or something. finally just ordered a QCX mini kit for 40m and spent a weekend on it. honestly the build wasn't as scary as i thought, took me maybe 4-5 hours total including all the winding on the toroid cores which i was dreading.

first contact was a guy in ohio, i'm in virginia, running about 4 watts into a end-fed halfwave up in a tree in my backyard. i know that's not DX or anything impressive but i sat there kind of stunned for a minute that this little thing i built with my own hands was actually talking to someone else's radio. hard to explain the feeling if you havent done it.

anyway my question for people who do a lot of QRP — is 40m a good band to start on or should i be looking at building something for 20m too? i mostly want to do portable stuff eventually, maybe SOTA activations. the 40m seems pretty good in the evenings but i notice it gets noisy during the day and i'm wondering if i'm missing out on contacts by not having 20m available.

congrats on the first build, that feeling you described is exactly why people get into homebrewing in the first place. it never really goes away either, i still get a little kick out of every contact on something i built myself.

for SOTA i'd honestly say 20m is probably more useful overall especially if you want to activate summits and work people further away. 40m is great but like you noticed it gets rough during the day and on a summit activation you might only have an hour or two up there. a lot of activators run both bands if they can, just swap the antenna or use a rig that covers multiple bands. the QCX mini only does one band right but you could always build a second one for 20m down the road, theyre not that expensive. or look into something like a MTR or an Elecraft KX2 if you want multiband in one box, though obviously thats a different price point than a kit build.

your end-fed into a tree sounds like a solid portable setup btw. what are you using for a feedpoint matchbox?

im in almost the exact same boat lol, built my qcx+ a few months ago and have been trying to figure out sota. 40m worked fine for me in the evenings but yeah daytime is rough, lot of static and qrm. i havent tried 20m yet but everyone keeps telling me to. maybe we should try and schedule a sked sometime, always cool to work another qcx user