18 Jun 2020

Pixie and Micro-80 transceivers

Some years ago I built a Micro-80 transceiver for 80m CW.

More recently I got a Pixie kit for 40m, which was very inexpensive and came with free airmail from China. It went together easily and enabled me to have a QSO with a local ham. It got put away thereafter as it was really an exercise to check out my building skills after my stroke in 2013.

On all these simple, compromise, rigs it is the receiver which is often the weakest link. They often have little selectivity and can easily be overloaded. These days there is far more FT8 activity and both SSB and  CW have suffered. Typical Pixie powers are 300-500mW. This power is more than enough to work plenty assuming you can copy the other station!

See https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/hf/pixie

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