so i've been lurking on this forum for a while and finally have something worth posting about. built my first homebrew QRP rig over the past few months, a pretty basic 40m CW transceiver based loosely on the pixie design but i kept modifying things as i went and it kind of evolved into its own thing. running about 2.5 watts out which honestly surprised me, was expecting less.

first contact was with a station about 340 miles away and i just about fell out of my chair. i know thats not impressive by DX standards but when you built the thing yourself with parts from your junk box its a different feeling entirely. took the whole setup out to a picnic table in the backyard too just to see if i could run it off a lipo pack and yeah it worked fine, maybe 3 hours of casual operating before i noticed voltage starting to sag.

anyway i guess my question is for anyone who does this regularly - how do you handle the receiver sensitivity side of things? mine pulls in signals fine on strong stuff but weaker stations i'm clearly missing. not sure if its a component quality issue or just the nature of these simple direct conversion designs. i dont have a lot of test equipment so its hard to know where to even start poking around.

congrats on the first contact, that feeling really doesn't get old no matter how many times it happens. the direct conversion sensitivity thing is kind of a known limitation with simpler designs - you're not doing anything wrong necessarily. a lot of builders add a simple RF preamp stage up front, nothing fancy, even a single JFET stage can make a noticeable difference on the weak ones. the other thing that kills receiver performance on these rigs more than people realize is the antenna and feedline situation. any common mode noise getting into your setup will just bury those weak signals. tried a choke balun at the feedpoint?

also 2.5 watts on a pixie-derived design is actually pretty solid, most of those run under a watt stock so you clearly did something right in the PA stage.

yeah im in a similar boat, built a small 20m rig last year and the receiver sensitivity was frustrating me for ages. turned out one of my toroids was wound wrong and was basically doing nothing useful. once i fixed that things improved a lot. might be worth double checking all your wound components if you havent already, its easy to lose count of turns especially on the smaller cores.

also just curious what case did you end up using for portble ops? im always fighting with enclosures for field use, everything either too heavy or too flimsy.