Is the QRP Labs QMX the Core of a Future TouCans Lite Plus?

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 :)

Update!

W6CSN, one of the other POTA activators here in San Francisco built his own QMX! Reading through the article makes the whole thing sound daunting, yet achievable. This is sounding better and better!

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