so i've been putting off building a QRP rig for like two years now, always telling myself i'd do it when i had more bench space or time or whatever excuse i was using that week. finally just sat down last month and built a little 40m CW transceiver based on the Sudden design, just 5 watts out and honestly it looks kind of rough but it works.

what surprised me most is how efficient the whole thing is. running off a 3ah lipo i built contacts for about 4 hours before i needed to worry about the battery and that includes a fair bit of tuning around. compared to dragging the IC-7300 out to the park and running a big battery it's just... way more fun somehow. there's something about knowing you built the thing and it's actually making contacts that hits different.

did have some issues with the TX audio being a bit chirpy at first, ended up being a decoupling cap i'd put in the wrong place on the oscillator section. took me an embarrassing amount of time to find that. anyway if anyone else is on the fence about building vs buying a kit vs just getting like a KX2 or whatever, i'm happy to talk through it. building from scratch isnt for everyone but its not as scary as i thought

chirpy TX is such a classic gotcha on those simple VFO designs, good catch on the decoupling cap though. i spent a weekend once chasing a similar problem and it turned out i'd used a ceramic cap where i needed something more stable for the oscillator circuit, temperature drift was making it wander all over the place every time my soldering iron got near it during testing which obviously made diagnosis a nightmare.

the efficiency thing you mentioned is real and its kind of underrated in the QRP world. i run a homebrew 20m rig i finished about three years ago and i've taken it up a few summits now, the weight savings vs. a commercial rig plus a big battery is huge when you're actually carrying it. mine's probably not as clean as a commercial kit but it works and i know every part of it which means i can actually fix it in the field if something goes sideways. congrats on getting it working, first homebrew contact is a feeling you don't really forget

this is really inspiring actually, im pretty new (got my tech last year, general a few months ago) and ive been looking at the KX3 but the price is kind of a lot right now. didnt really know you could just... build one from scratch like that. is the Sudden design something that has instructions online or do you need to buy a book or something? also does 5 watts actually get you contacts reliably or is it kind of hit or miss