so i've been lurking on here for a while and finally took the plunge and built one of those 4state QRP kits, the one for 40m. took me about two weekends to put together mostly because i kept second guessing my solder joints and had to go back and redo a few of them. anyway got it all together, hooked it up to my end fed half wave out the window and figured i'd just listen for a bit before actually trying to transmit.

well about 20 minutes in i heard a CQ from a station down in florida, i'm in ohio so figured why not just try, i mean worst case nobody hears me right. put out like 4 or 5 watts and the guy came back to me first call. i genuinely had to double check he was actually calling my callsign because i couldn't believe it worked that fast honestly. we had a solid 10 minute QSO, he gave me a 559 which felt pretty great for something i built on my kitchen table.

anyway just wanted to share because i know this forum helped me a lot when i was trying to decide if QRP was worth getting into. it really is. the whole experience of making that contact with a rig i actually built myself was something else. now i'm already looking at the 20m version of the same kit because of course i am

that feeling never really goes away, first contact on a homebrew rig is just different from anything else in this hobby. i built a rockmite years ago and still remember exactly who i worked and what the band conditions were like that evening. congrats on getting the solder joints right too, those small kits can be fussy especially around the toroids if you haven't wound a lot of them before.

the 20m kit is a good choice for your next one, propagation on 20 can be really rewarding for QRP because you get a much bigger potential contact range especially in the afternoon. just make sure your antenna situation is solid on that band, a lot of the time with QRP the antenna is doing more work than the rig itself. if you're ever thinking about portable operation look into a simple linked dipole, it's not complicated to build and gives you a lot of flexibility.

dude yes this is exactly why i got into QRP, i just passed my general like 3 months ago and im still saving up for my first kit but reading stuff like this makes me want to just do it already. what kit was it exactly? the 4state ones look cool but i wasn't sure which band to start on, 40 or 20. also did you need any test equipment to build it or can you kinda just put it together and trust the process