Yet another brilliantly fantastic night at the Swindon & District Amateur Radio Club. Earlier in the year, the club implemented an incentive whereby members were asked to take part in a ‘bulk build’ of Pixie, 40m, QRP, CW Transceivers.
These are inexpensive kits and only take a couple of hours to build. The idea behind the incentive was to engage club members and get them into building their own equipment, putting their electronics knowledge and practical skills to good use, but most of all to have a bit of fun in the hobby.
Nearly a quarter of the club members decided to take part and get involved and a total of 17 kits were ordered for these members. They were all given a couple of months to complete their kits and this evening the club ran a ‘Bring, Show and Test’ evening to test and review all the kits that had been built.
An enthusiastic crowd turned up at the club this evening, with a copious amount of test equipment to assist with the testing of the Pixie kits. The mood at the club this evening was one of excitement and anticipation whilst builders waited for their kits to be tested and reviewed.
Out of the 17 kits handed out, 11 of them made it for testing this evening. A few were missing due to members being unavailable or on holiday, etc. but we thought that 11 was a pretty good turnout.
Each kit was tested on two test sets. One was checking TX output and audio tone on a receiver, with CW guru Phil, M0PBZ providing some impressive CW keying on both a straight and paddle key to test the transceivers. The other test set was again measuring TX output and basic RX sensitivity. Finally, each kit was inspected for build quality. This wasn’t to be critical, but more to provide some feedback to the builders. As it happens, the build quality was pretty excellent on all of the kits, with only one having a fault, which we believe was down to a dry joint; unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to fully diagnose, but we’ll get it sorted.
The TX power from all the kits were all pretty close, with a fairly uniform range between 780mW and 850mW at 12 volts and most of the receivers had a sensitivity of 15 micro-volts.
Thanks to Andrew, M1CJE, and Darren, G1ERM for providing the test kit, as well as the other members who also brought along power supplies and other test equipment. It was a great club collaboration.
Tonight was what Amateur Radio is all about. Construction, Testing, Camaraderie, Discussion, Banter; An overall excellent, productive, and enjoyable evening.
We now have plans afoot to put the kits to good use and get them all on the air during another club evening.
Thanks to all the kit builders; without you, this evening would not have been possible. Also thanks to the other club members who didn’t build kits, but showed equal interest and enthusiasm in the project.
Kit Builders:
Mark, M0KYB
Bob, G0VTA
Andrew, M1CJE
Chris, 2E0GGU
Chris, G4AJA
Roy, G4VWG
Paul, G0EPC
Graham, G4OED
John, G1VRJ
Elwyn, G8EFK
Mike, G4HGV
