so i've been lurking on this forum for a while and finally bit the bullet and built my first QRP rig from scratch. went with the classic Pixie kit because everyone says start simple, and yeah i get it now. took me about two evenings to put together, third evening to figure out why it wasnt transmitting (cold solder joint on the crystal, classic me)

anyway got it on 40m and made my first contact with a guy about 300 miles away running maybe 500mw. i was absolutely floored. ive been licensed for two years and mostly just used a baofeng and my club's repeater so this felt like a completely different hobby honestly. the signal report wasnt great, 57 i think, but it was a real contact on a rig i built myself and that still feels kind of surreal

now im already thinking about what to build next. ive been looking at the QCX mini but the price jump feels significant compared to the pixie kit. is it worth it or should i look at something else for portable ops? i do a lot of hiking and want something that can run off a small lipo pack without me having to carry a car battery up a mountain

congrats on the first build man, that cold solder joint thing is basically a rite of passage. i think ive reflowed half my projects at least once before they started working right.

the QCX mini is genuinely excellent for what it is. ive run mine on a 3s lipo with a small buck converter keeping it around 9v and the efficiency is pretty impressive, you can get a whole afternoon of POTA activations out of a reasonably small pack. the built in keyer and filtering is so much better than a pixie that its kind of not a fair comparison. for hiking its really hard to beat the size to capability ratio. only thing i'd say is the display can be a little hard to read in bright sunlight but thats minor.

if you want to go even lighter look into the uBITX v6 once you're comfortable building more complex stuff, but for now i think the QCX mini would make you really happy and its not hard to put together at all.

oh wow a pixie on 40m is rough conditions to start with lol, good on you for pulling that contact out. i tried QRP for the first time last summer doing a SOTA activation and i was totally unprepared for how much antenna matters at low power. like more than anything else. i had a random wire thrown in a tree and it made a huge difference vs the little telescopic whip i tried first.

dont sleep on just spending time on antenna for whatever you build next, it'll get you further than upgrading the rig honestly. thats what an old timer at my club keeps telling me and he's annoyingly right about it every time