so i finally finished building the QFX-40 kit (well, a knockoff of it anyway, one of those chinese kits off aliexpress) and took it out to the park yesterday with a random wire antenna and a 4ah lipo i had sitting around from an old RC project. figured id share some thoughts since there isnt a ton of casual writeups about the lower budget end of QRP

first thing that surprised me — making contacts at 5 watts is actually harder than i expected but also way more satisfying when it works? spent like 45 minutes calling CQ on 40m and got nothing, then switched to hunting and worked a guy in ohio from here in tennessee on the first call. so thats something. the audio on RX is thin but workable and the keyer they included is actually pretty decent for a kit this cheap

battery life is ridiculous though, like genuinely shocking how long it lasts compared to running even 25 watts on my regular rig. been thinking about doing more SOTA stuff and this might actually be the way to go. anyone else gone down this road and have tips for portable ops? im still figuring out what antenna setup makes the most sense for throwing in a pack

welcome to the rabbit hole haha. seriously once you go QRP portable it gets kind of addictive. i started with a similar kit build a few years back and ended up with four different rigs now, which my wife finds unreasonable

for the antenna question — honestly for SOTA and general portable stuff a lot of people swear by the end fed half wave with a little matchbox tuner. packs down to almost nothing and you can lean it against a tree or use a telescoping fishing rod as a mast for like 20 bucks. the endfed does better than a random wire in my experience, less RFI getting back into stuff and seems to tune easier on multiple bands if you get the right transformer ratio. 49:1 is the usual for multiband. you can wind your own in an afternoon, there are a million videos on it

the other thing id say is dont get discouraged by slow days. QRP is just kind of feast or famine especially on 40 during the day. 20m and 17m have treated me way better for medium-haul stuff when conditions cooperate

i'm pretty new too so take this for what its worth but i got a similar cheap kit and the thing that helped me most was just being really patient and picking good times to operate. like early morning on 40m before the band gets noisy. also making sure my keying is clean — apparently sloppy fist is worse at low power because youre already asking the other station to work harder to copy you

havent done SOTA yet but it looks really fun from the videos ive seen