so i finally took the plunge and built one of those youkits clones from a kit i ordered off qrz classifieds like six months ago, been sitting on my bench forever. took it out to the state park saturday with a buddipole and a 3ah lipo i had from an old drone project.

managed to get three contacts on 20m running about 4 watts, one of them was in spain which i was honestly shocked about. but i had a few weird things happen, signal reports were all over the place and at one point the rig just kind of... stopped transmitting mid qso. came back fine after i cycled the power but that was a little nerve wracking.

is that a thermal thing? temps were around 85 degrees out and i had it sitting on the picnic table in direct sun like an idiot. also wondering if anyone has tips for squeezing more efficiency out of these little rigs, i feel like im leaving watts on the table somewhere. antenna matching maybe? my swr was reading about 1.8:1 on most of the band.

yeah 85 degrees in direct sun is gonna cook those little finals pretty quick, especially if the kit uses the typical IRF510 or similar. most of those budget kits dont have great thermal management to begin with so even modest temps can push them into protection mode or just cause weird behavior. i'd throw a small clip-on heatsink on the final transistor if you havent already, makes a big difference. also 1.8:1 isnt terrible but youre still losing a noticeable chunk of your already limited power to reflected, worth spending some time with an antenna analyzer if you have access to one. the spain contact at 4w is great though, 20m with good conditions can really surprise you.

oh man spain at 4 watts is awesome, thats the whole reason i got into qrp honestly. i built a mountain topper a while back and had similar shutdown issues until i realized i was just running it too hard duty cycle wise, like doing long overs in ssb. if youre running cw it shouldnt be as bad but ssb with voice can really stress those little rigs. anyway welcome to the rabbit hole haha, once you start chasing contacts at low power its kind of addicting