Hi Hombrewers:

The circuit board on top is the receiver board from my latest project which is aimed at those who are new to Ham Radio or new to "homebrewing' their own radios. The complete project is in a two part article, the first of which will appear in the Spring Issue of QRP Quarterly and covers the building of the receiver plus some of the test equipment necessary to get it up and running. The second segment will include the transmitter portion. Basically when the project is finished you will have a 5 Watt 40M QRP CW Transceiver that is VXO controlled, has a narrow crystal filter and tunes 30 KHz of the 40M CW band including the two popular QRP frequencies. The cicruit is comprised of well proven building blocks and the method employed in the article is to build and test as you go. This provides a means to identify, isolate and correct the problem before proceeding onto the next stage. Great pains were taken to insure that all of the detail is covered to insure a successful build.

The second photo is a shot of the transmitter board, the Keyer, the TR switch, Low Pass Filter and the MMIC based receiver RF Amplifier.

There were several goals in the development of this project. One of them was cost so that no single part would cost more than $2. With the exception of two parts that goal was achieved. Second was that it would offer high performance without the use of arcane and mystery circuits. Third was ease of construction so the one didn't need an advanced degree in solid state physics just to build a receiver.

This page has been set up so that more detail of the schematics can be seen than might be available in the printed article and also includes two parts lists. One list is set up so that all of the parts for a specific buidling block complete with the part numbers and the identified supplier. The QRP Quarterly editor asked me to limit the parts acquisition to just a few suppliers so that shipping charges could be minimized. I did that. A second cut of the parts list is to identify all parts associated with a specific supplier. Since these lists are in excel format --it will be possible to cut and paste the list right into the supplier's order forms. The real build information is in the article so you will need to join QRPARCI and get a subscription to the QRP Quarterly so that you can read the step by step process.

One of the most daunting problems is parts and having a stock to start a project see the article here that was slated for publication in QRP Quarterly but didn't make the cut. It describes how to stuff a Junk Box and recommended quantity buys of select parts.