so i've been wanting to do QRP for a while now and finally pulled the trigger on an Elecraft KX2 kit back in december. took me about two weekends to put it together, mostly because i kept second-guessing myself on the toroids and had to rewind one of them after i lost count of the turns. honestly thought i ruined the whole thing when i first powered it up and got nothing on receive, but turns out i had the volume knob confused with the RF gain which... yeah. anyway.

once i actually got it working i took it out to a state park last saturday with a random wire antenna just strung up in a tree and made 4 contacts on 40m running 5 watts. one of them was a station in texas and im in ohio so that felt pretty good to me. the whole setup including the radio, battery, and antenna stuff fit in a small backpack with room for lunch.

my question for the folks who have been doing portable QRP stuff for a while — how do you deal with the noise floor when youre out in the field? even at the park there was some QRM that made weaker signals hard to pull out. im using the built in filters but wondering if theres something else im missing or if this just gets easier as you get better at cw

congrats on the first kit build, rewinding toroids is basically a rite of passage at this point lol. the noise floor thing is something you kind of learn to work around over time honestly. a lot of it is antenna placement — even moving your wire a few feet can make a surprising difference, especially if theres any power lines or parking lot lights nearby. i find that getting the feedpoint up as high as possible and keeping the coax or feedline away from yourself and the radio helps a fair bit too.

the other thing that helped me a ton was slowing down on cw and not trying to copy everything at once. when a signal is borderline readable your brain can fill in a lot of gaps if youre not panicking about it. the KX2's filters are actually pretty decent for a rig that small so you probably have more tools there than you realize, try narrowing the bandwidth down to like 200hz when things get crowded and see if that clears it up some.

ohio to texas on 5w is a solid first outing. 40m can be finicky but when its good its really good for that kind of distance.

man i just started looking into QRP myself and this is kind of inspiring, i had no idea you could fit a whole HF setup in a backpack. what battery are you running with it? thats the part that always seems to get heavy fast from what ive read