so i picked up a QCX mini kit a few months back mostly just to have a building project over the winter and honestly i had no idea it would turn me into a full on QRP addict. put it together over a few evenings, had one cold solder joint that took me forever to track down but got it sorted, and the first time i made a contact with 5 watts i was just sitting there kind of stunned. worked a station in ohio from upstate new york on 40m and it felt way more satisfying than any of my 100w contacts ever did.

anyway now im reading everything i can about QRP portable ops, SOTA activations, building more kits. my wife thinks im losing my mind because i now have three half-finished kits on the workbench. anyone else go down this rabbit hole and have suggestions for what to build or try next? im thinking about doing a SOTA activation this spring but not sure what antenna setup makes sense for a quick summit deployment. been looking at end fed halfwaves but open to ideas

yeah the QCX mini is a great first build, that kit is really well thought out. i went through the exact same thing a few years ago, started with a Rock Mite just to see if i could build something that actually worked, and now i have a dedicated shelf for QRP stuff and my wife has also expressed similar concerns lol.

for SOTA i'd really reccomend just keeping it simple with the antenna honestly. an EFHW with a small matching transformer, maybe 49:1 ratio, and you can get a resonant antenna for 40 or 20m that rolls up into basically nothing. a lot of activators use a linked dipole so they can switch bands without swapping antennas, which is nice if you want to chase multiple bands on one activation. either way throw it up in a nearby tree or on a cheap fiberglass mast and youll be making contacts in minutes. the nice thing with QRP on a summit is youve got the high ground working for you, propagation can be surprisingly good even at 5w or less.

im kind of in the same boat as you right now, just finished my first kit a couple weeks ago (different one, a BitX40 i got secondhand partially built which was its own adventure). the feeling when you make that first real contact with low power is genuinely hard to describe. like you earned it somehow. good luck on the SOTA stuff, that looks really fun, im hoping to try it once the weather gets better here