See
http://www.ozqrp.com/index.html .
A nice line of SSB QRP transceivers for 80, 40 or 20m with power up to 5W. These kits come from Australia and payment is by PayPal. I have no experience of these kits so have no idea how they perform when bands are busy as in Europe.
It looks like these are easy to build kits.
Quite nice, reminds me for some reason of one the old G3WPO DSB rigs
ReplyDeletefrom years ago.
But the Oz kits are a bit pricey for what they are, plus shipping and taxes
to be paid doesn't make them great value for UK buyers I think.
I bought one, and built it of course, Summer of 2012. Living in London then I had pay 61GBP for the complete kit but the box. Almost the price of an MKARS80 which I have built also. I don't call that expensive!
ReplyDeleteAt an exchange rate of about 2 Australian dollars to the pound, I guess the price is "marginal" and depends on whether or not one has to pay duty and handling charges, not forgetting the case is extra too.
ReplyDeleteI agree that, in the case shown, it resembles a DSB rig from G3WPO.
ReplyDeleteTo make the complete rig requires all the modules to be purchased.
ReplyDeleteI make that £101 and that excludes the case and extra hardware.
Now add shipping, maybe £20.
That's £120 plus VAT and Royal Mail
collection charges which would be about £6.
Total cost about £126.
And you still gotta supply your own case, hardware and microphone.
You could be up to almost £200 by the time you have finished.
Almost the price of a second hand FT817, or a 1990's 100w 0-30Mhz
rig.
In fact you could get an Icom 706 for £200 these days.
Kits are great, but they never really offer great value for money.
You're really buying the satisfaction of something you can build.
And it's usually that which drives most of us to purchase such things.