so i finally got around to building one of those 40m pixie kits, the cheap ones you can get for like 3 or 4 bucks shipped. i honestly expected it to be kind of a disappointment because how much can you really do with 500mw right? but i ended up making contact with a guy in ohio from my backyard in pennsylvania on my first real attempt and i just sat there kind of stunned for a minute.

the kit itself was pretty straightforward, took me maybe an hour and a half including my terrible soldering on the first few joints which i had to redo. the direct conversion receiver is noisy and the transmit frequency drifts a bit when it warms up but honestly for learning purposes its been amazing. i can actually hear whats happening on the band and understand what im doing in a way that using my regular radio never really taught me.

anyway i guess im asking has anyone else gone down this rabbit hole because ive been looking at the mcHF and some of the other more serious QRP builds and i feel like i could spend the rest of my life just building radios at this point. also is there a good way to stabilize the frequency drift on something like the pixie or is it just a fundamental limitation of the design?

oh man welcome to the QRP rabbit hole, you are not getting out haha. the frequency drift on the pixie is pretty much baked into the design — its using a colpitts oscillator without any temperature compensation so as the crystal and surrounding components heat up it wanders. some people have had luck adding a small heatsink to the crystal or even putting a little foam over the oscillator section to slow down the thermal changes, but you're never going to make it rock solid without moving to something that has a proper TCXO or a PLL based VFO.

if you want to keep building i'd really look at the uBITX or even the bitx40 as a next step. bit more complex but the documentation is incredible and theres a huge community around them. the QRP Labs kits are also really well designed, hans summers puts a lot of thought into those. the QCX series in particular — ive built two of them and they just work, clean signal, good filtering, very happy with both.

that ohio contact at 500mw is a great start honestly, once you start chasing states with QRP it gets kind of addictive.

yeah the pixie was my first build too actually, did mine on 80m. the drift drove me a bit crazy at first but i kind of learned to just retune every few minutes and it became normal. i think theres something to be said for learning on a radio that forces you to really pay attention.

im curious what antenna you were running when you made that ohio contact? ive been trying to figure out if my problem is the radio or my wire antenna situation because i havent had as much luck