so i've been putting off building one of these for probably two years now, kept telling myself i'd get to it. picked up a QCX mini kit over the winter and finally sat down with it last month. took me a couple evenings to get through the build, i'm not the fastest solderer in the world and my eyes aren't what they used to be so there was a lot of squinting involved.

anyway it works. like actually works, which honestly surprised me a little because i've had kit builds go sideways before. got it calibrated, ran it into a 40m dipole i have in the backyard and worked a guy in ohio on 5 watts. just a casual QSO but still, felt pretty good. the efficiency on these little rigs is genuinely impressive, the thing barely gets warm even running continuous for a while.

only complaint so far is the sidetone volume is kind of annoying to adjust and i keep bumping the tuning knob which is way too sensitive for my fat fingers. might try to print a bigger knob for it. anyone else run one of these or similar and have tips for portable use? thinking about throwing it in a bag with a small LiFePO4 battery and heading out to the park or something.

congrats on the first successful kit build, those QCX minis are really solid little rigs. i built the full size QCX a few years back and had a similar experience, just works out of the box once you get the alignment done right.

for the knob issue i just grabbed a random larger aluminum knob off amazon that happened to fit the shaft, made a huge difference. the tuning sensitivity you can actually adjust in the menu if i remember right, there's a setting for the steps per encoder click or something like that — worth digging into the manual for that part because mine was also way too twitchy at first.

for portable ops i use mine with a 3ah LiFePO4 and a random wire with a 9:1 unun, whole setup fits in a medium sized stuff sack. you can run for a long time on those batteries at 5 watts, like seriously the math on it is really favorable. have fun with the parks stuff, that's where QRP really shines in my opinion.

im also pretty new to all this and just ordered a pixie kit which i know isnt quite the same thing but reading about your build is making me more excited to try. did you have any previous soldering experience or did you kind of just figure it out as you went