Reading qrper.com over the weekend—an excellent QRP specific blog with lots of guests posts—I found an article about the QRPLabs QMX. I'd not heard of the rig before, so I settled in for a good read. And, and SIGH!!!!
That was a happily exasperated sigh, as often happens when one reads something by a member of the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast crew. You know, the kind that means I'll probably be spending money soon, and probably also quite a bit of mostly fun building time :) Speaking of time sinks, I really enjoyed reading the FDIM paper QRPLabs linked to from the QMX page.
So! The rig's cool! It's a (tunable!) QRP five band rig!
"Well", I thought, "I'll read the assembly manual." "That will put me off," I thought...
Not So Much! Sadly, for my wallet and time budget. Please mark my famous kit-building last words, but that doesn't look that bad!
OK, ok, ok, I hear what you're saying, "But will it fit in the rig?"
Well, yeah.
The enclosure for the QMX is 3.623 x 2.481 x 0.99 inches, (where I've rounded up in every case.) Consequently it will fit handily in a pineapple can that measures about 3 7/16 inches by 4 inches. Frankly, the whole thing might fit in 'just' a tuna can, even in an enclosure. Which, just so you know, I have no intention of doing.
Here's the other really cool thing. The QMX also has CAT control. I've not worked with such a fancy thing before, but I'm guessing the Pico-W we're currently controllin TouCans with can handle cranking out serial commands for the CAT contoller! And can the rig operate headless? Maybe? I did find one reference to headless operation in the manual. Here's hoping it can run truly headless, because what good is a LCD display in a pineapple can 15 feet up in the air anyway?
It looks like the QMX might be my next attempted QRP Labs build. Hoooo boy :)
Comments
Post a Comment
Please leave your comments on this topic: