so i finally pulled the trigger on one of those QCX mini kits a few months back, took me a couple weekends to put together because i kept second guessing my soldering on the toroids. honestly the toroid winding was the part i was most nervous about but it came out fine, got it aligned and on the first real contact i made i was running 5 watts into a wire dipole strung between two trees in the backyard and worked a station in ohio from new england, which i know isnt exactly DX but something about knowing you built the thing yourself and its working makes it feel like you crossed the atlantic.

anyway now i cant stop thinking about portable ops. been reading about sota and i took it out to a local hilltop last weekend with a little lipo pack and just a random wire with a 9:1 unun and made 4 contacts in about an hour. the efficiency thing is what gets me, like you really start to understand propagation when youre limited to 5 watts and you actually have to think about when and where to transmit instead of just cranking up the power. does anyone else find that qrp kind of rewired how they think about operating in general? curious if others went down this rabbit hole

oh man yeah it absolutely rewired my thinking, been running qrp almost exclusively for about 6 years now and honestly going back to a full power rig feels almost like cheating now, which i know sounds weird. the discipline you develop watching propagation and timing your calls and picking the right band window, thats stuff you just dont think about when youre running 100 watts because you can kind of brute force your way through marginal conditions.

the kit building side of it too, once you build one transceiver you start wanting to understand every stage and before long youre modifying things and eventually maybe doing scratch builds. i built a little 40m direct conversion rig from scratch a couple years ago based on some designs from EMRFD and it worked, i mean it wasnt pretty and the audio had a bit of hum i never fully sorted out but it worked. the qcx is a great starting point, Hans Summers really did a solid job with the design on those. sota is the perfect application for what youre describing, if you havent dug into the sota reflector yet theres a ton of good info on antenna setups people use for summits.

i just got my technician last spring and been reading about qrp a lot, havent built anything yet but threads like this make me want to try. quick question though, when you say 9:1 unun with a random wire, how long was the wire roughly? i keep seeing different numbers and im not sure what actually works vs what people just happen to have in their backpack