so i finally finished the Sudden receiver kit ive been slowly working on for about three months and paired it with a little bitx40 transmitter board i picked up last year and just never got around to doing anything with. got the whole thing crammed into an old tupperware container which sounds ridiculous but honestly it works and its not that heavy.

took it out to a state park saturday with a end-fed half wave i threw up in a tree maybe 25 feet or so and just started calling CQ on 7.030 running about 4 watts. wasnt expecting much because ive heard 40 can be rough during the day but i ended up working 6 stations over a couple hours including one guy in Tennessee which from my QTH in upstate new york is not bad at all i think. one of them was running 5 watts too so that was cool, felt like we were in the same boat.

the whole setup runs off a little 3ah lipo pack and i barely made a dent in it. thats the thing nobody really talks about with QRP - the battery situation is just so much more manageable when your whole rig draws like 600mA on transmit. anyway just wanted to share because ive been lurking here for a long time and this felt like something worth posting about finally.

Tennessee from upstate NY on 4 watts and a wire in a tree is genuinely solid, dont let anyone tell you otherwise. 40m during the day gets a bad rap but if the skip is right you can really punch through. ive had similar luck around 14-16 UTC when the noise floor drops a bit before the afternoon stuff kicks in.

the battery thing you mentioned is so true and its kind of the hidden benefit that draws a lot of people to QRP in the first place. i ran a whole field day operation on a single 5ah battery with a KX2 a couple summers ago and still had juice left over. once you get used to that freedom its hard to go back to dragging a big gel cell everywhere.

whats your next project? if you havent looked at the QCX series from QRP Labs those are worth a look. hans summers does good work and the efficiency on those little rigs is impressive for the price.

tupperware enclosure lol i love it, thats very on brand for homebrew QRP. ive seen way worse enclosures at hamfests trust me. someone at our club meeting once showed up with a rig in a mint tin and it actually worked fine so dont knock it til you try it i guess.

im jealous though, i keep meaning to do more portable stuff but my antenna situation at home is so bad that i end up spending all my time trying to make that work instead of actually going outside. maybe this summer ill just commit to doing a POTA activation and stop making excuses.