I have been doing POTA activations for a few years now. its great fun and encourages us amateur radio operators to develop off-grid communications systems. If you haven’t heard of POTA, its a somewhat new thing in the world of ham radio. The best thing you can do is go to their website to get the whole scoop. Its parksontheair.com.
So in planning a vacation with my daughter, I wanted to do POTA activations however there wasn’t going to be any room for my regular POTA gear. This “required” me to look into a new rig. Lo and behold, i stumbled on to QRP-Labs’ QCX-mini transceiver. Man is it tiny! It measures 3 3/4″ x 2 1/2′ x 1 3/4″. Don’t let the size fool you, this thing packed with all kinds of features!
The QCX-Mini Features
- Easy to build, two-board design, (if you are an experienced builder) board with main circuit and connectors, display panel board with LCD; all-controls board-mounted on a press-out sub-board. No wiring, all controls and connectors are board-mounted.
- Professional quality double-sided, through-hole plated, silk-screen printed PCBs
- Choice of single band, 80, 60, 40, 30, 20 or 17m
- Approximately 3-5W CW output (depending on supply voltage)
- 7-14V recommended supply voltage
- Class E power amplifier, transistors run cool…
- 7-element Low Pass Filter ensures regulatory compliance
- CW envelope shaping to remove key clicks
- High performance receiver with at least 50dB of unwanted sideband cancellation
- 200Hz CW filter with no ringing
- Si5351A Synthesized VFO with rotary encoder tuning
- 16 x 2 yellow/green LCD screen
- Iambic keyer or straight key option included in the firmware
- Simple Digital Signal Processing assisted CW decoder, displayed real-time on-screen
- On-screen S-meter
- On-screen real time clock (not battery backed up)
- Full or semi QSK operation using fast solid-state transmit/receive switching
- Frequency presets, VFO A/B Split operation, RIT, configurable CW Offset
- Configurable sidetone frequency and volume
- Connectors: 2.1mm power barrel connector, 3.5mm keyer jack, 3.5mm stereo earphone jack, 3.5mm stereo jack for PTT, 3.5mm stereo jack for CAT control, BNC RF output
- Built-in test signal generator and alignment tools to complete simple set-up adjustments
- Built-in test equipment: voltmeter, RF power meter, frequency counter, signal generator
- Beacon mode, supporting automatic CW, FSKCW or WSPR operation
- GPS interface for reference frequency calibration and time-keeping (for WSPR beacon)
- CAT control interface
- Optional 50W PA kit
- Optional aluminium extruded cut/drilled/laser-etched black anodized enclosure
Tell me about the CW assist. I am fair at CW but an assist, that works well, to help decode and double check me would be very useful. Did it work? Thanks
Good question! I was going to talk about that but forgot to. I fiddled with it a little and was not real impressed. Maybe if I had spent more time with it perhaps it would have worked.
One nice thing about POTA, is their spotting page: pota.us What I encourage people to do when they are learning CW is to find a POTA CW spot. The spot has all the info to make a legit POTA QSO. So all you really need to be able to do is to copy your own call. So when you hear your call, just send his RST and your state abbreviation. The POTA rules for a QSO are very laid back.
Hope this helps!
— Mike
The CW Assist (decoder) works great, but requires getting it setup correctly. I am no expert at it at all, but I fiddled around with the settings on it and it works very well if everything is working properly. That would include band conditions being good. I know you have to set noise floor level, and wpm inside the decoder menu.
I have found out that you want your volume down enough that it mainly hears the CW tones and not all the background noises on the band. All the hissing and noise on the band the CW decoder tries to decode. But a good clean CW signal it does fine.
I have the original QCX in 40 Meter and just built the QCXmini in 40 Meter and I believe the decoder is better than what it was in the the original QCX.
Glad you had a blast with yours. I am now tempted to go out and try my QCXmini with my EF random wire antenna I built.
73 Juddie WD8WV
Hello and thank you for you input on the CW assist. Can you please share your parameters that you used to get it working properly?
— Mike