so i've been puttering around with the idea of building a small QRP rig for probably two years now and i finally just did it. built a little 40m CW transceiver from a kit, one of the Pixie derivatives but i modded it a bit with a better filter cap and swapped the crystal for one i had sitting in my junk box that puts me at a slightly less crowded spot on the band. took the whole thing out to the park last saturday with a 9v battery and a wire antenna i just threw up in a tree.

honestly wasnt expecting much. five watts (well more like 3 honestly with that battery) and i figured id just hear a bunch of stuff and nobody would hear me. made 4 contacts in about an hour and a half, one of them was down in florida which i was pretty happy about considering im in ohio. the battery barely got warm which surprised me, i think people underestimate how long a small lipo or even a 9v will last when your TX duty cycle is low.

anyway the whole setup fits in a small canvas bag and the radio itself is about the size of a deck of cards. kind of addictive honestly. thinking about trying SOTA next summer with this thing or maybe building something for 20m too. anyone else been down this rabbit hole

oh man welcome to the addiction lol. seriously QRP portable is one of those things that once it clicks for you its hard to go back to sitting in the shack with a big radio. i built an SW-40 back in the day and had basically the same experience, that first contact on something you built with your own hands is just different.

for 20m if you go that route i'd look at some of the designs on EMRFD or even just grab a 4state QRP kit, they're reasonable and you learn a lot from building them. the efficiency thing you mentioned is real by the way - running low power with a good antenna is almost always more effective than people think. most of the signal is in the antenna anyway. a half wave dipole in a tree beats a rubber duck on a 100w radio any day.

SOTA is absolutely worth it with QRP. just make sure you log your activations properly and get the antenna as high as you can, the elevation does a lot of the work for you up on a summit. good luck and 73

that florida contact from ohio on 3 watts is legit, i wouldnt have believed it before i started doing QRP but propagation does weird things sometimes and 40m especially at certain times of day just carries. what time were you out there roughly? im curious because ive had similar results in the afternoon when the skip is right.