so i finally finished building one of those QRP kits, went with the ubitx v6 after reading about it for like 3 months before pulling the trigger. took me a few evenings to get it all together and honestly the build went smoother than i expected for my first real radio kit. hooked it up to a dummy load and SWR meter and im seeing about 8 watts on 40m which i thought was going to be higher? manual says up to 10w but i read somewhere that a lot of these come in a bit under that and its not a big deal. anyway i took it out to the back yard with a random wire antenna and made a few contacts on 7.200 and people could hear me fine so im not really complaining.

the thing i cant figure out is when i drop down to 20m the power falls off quite a bit, maybe 4-5w at best. is that normal for this rig or is there a trimmer adjustment i should be looking at? ive seen mention of the PA bias pots but dont want to touch anything without knowing what im doing. also curious if anyone else runs this radio portable, wondering what battery setup people use for hiking since i want to take it out on a SOTA activation eventually.

yeah that's pretty normal for the ubitx honestly. the higher bands tend to drop off in power and 20m being around 4-5w is not unusual at all. there are some modifications floating around on the ubitx groups.io that address the PA stage and can squeeze a bit more out of it on the higher bands but in my experience it isnt really worth chasing those last couple watts. 5w on 20m with a decent antenna will still get you plenty of contacts, i run 5w qrp all the time and work europe from the midwest regularly.

for SOTA and portable i use a 3 cell lipo pack, something around 4-5 amp hours and it lasts me a good long time. a lot of guys use the bioenno lifepo4 packs and swear by them for the weight savings. just make sure you have a way to monitor voltage so you dont run it too low. also if you havent joined the qrp-l mailing list or the associated groups.io communities there's a ton of knowledge in there from people way smarter than me about squeezing every last milliwatt out of these little rigs.

i built the same kit last winter and had the same question about 20m power. ended up just leaving it alone and it works fine. made my first ever dx contact with it running like 4 watts into a linked dipole up about 25 feet and it genuinely surprised me how far qrp gets you when conditions are halfway decent. dont stress too much about the exact output number i think we all get a little caught up in the watt chasing thing when really the antenna and operating skill matter way more.