so ive been wanting to do this for probably two years now and last weekend i finally just did it. built a little pixie kit i got off ebay for like eight bucks, yeah i know its not the most impressive thing but i had to start somewhere right. spent maybe three evenings getting it together, had to reflow a couple solder joints because i was being sloppy but eventually got it running.

took it out to the county park saturday morning with a 9v battery and a wire i threw up in a tree — probably 20 feet of random wire honestly, nothing fancy. was putting out maybe 500mw if that. figured id hear nothing and come home disappointed.

ended up making contact with a guy in ohio, im in western pennsylvania so its not like a huge distance but i was genuinely shocked it worked at all. we had a short exchange, signal reports were honestly not great on either end but the qso happened and i logged it and sat there kind of grinning like an idiot for a few minutes.

anyway the whole thing made me want to build something better. has anyone here gone from a pixie type kit to something more like an mw0yks or an elecraft type setup and was the jump worth it, like in terms of what you can actually do with it on the air. im trying to figure out if i should keep building kits or just save up for something like a kx2.

that Ohio contact on 500mw is pretty solid for a first outing honestly, dont undersell it. QRP is one of those things where the distance almost doesnt matter — its the fact that you built the thing and made it work that counts. i remember my first pixie contact and it felt completely out of proportion to how excited i was about it given it was like 40 miles away haha.

to your question about the jump to something better — i went the kit building route for a while before i got a KX2 and both are genuinely fun but for totally different reasons. the kits teach you something real about whats happening inside the radio, you start to understand why certain design choices get made. the KX2 is just a fantastic radio but its kind of a black box. if i had to do it again id probably build a few more kits first, maybe look at the QCX series from QRP labs, hans summers stuff is really well documented and the receivers are actually good. youll learn a lot more than the pixie taught you and youll be able to work some real DX on 5 watts if conditions cooperate.

the qcx mini is what i went to after messing around with cheap kits and its a huge step up, the filtering alone makes a difference when the bands are crowded. also just throwing this out there but have you tried SOTA or POTA yet because QRP portable operating kind of clicks into place when you have an actual reason to be out in the field. its way more fun than just sitting in the park tbh, you get people specifically hunting for you and the exchanges actually mean something