QRP means reduced power. In a hobby that often gathers around 100-1500W shack racks, my ‘get in the game’ strategy was to go small, be portable.
Why, really? Well. After all, if the PNW goes dark after a Cascadia seismic event, it might be handy.
Meet my tiny all band / low power transceiver. In this case it’s tuned to a frequency my license permits and radiating at 10W. That’s my top power.
Made a DYI dipole antenna cut for 20M, and then it’s time to check the SWR (Standing Wave Rato.) Doing so leads to adjusting the length of the dipole legs which tunes the conductors to resonate at those frequencies. 14.175 to 14.350mHz for my license class.
First? Check: Is the SWR meter working? Does the Meter show high SWR with no load (infinite impedance.) No antenna attached…
What’s the SWR (Standing Wave Ratio) of my DIY antenna? (aiming for less than 2:1 … is gud!)
The header image in this post is the SWR output when I switched to the 10m band. It looks correct. The 20m antenna should resonate on a higher (2X) harmonic of 14mHz / 28mHz.
Alas, even at 10 watts, I haven’t had any QSO’s (That’s contacts) since I reached my local club President by tuning the radio and talking to him on the cell phone a few days ago. Looks like there’s a reason shack racks drive their antennas with more than 10 times the power I’m using.
The other things I have to consider are antenna location and geomagnetics. Here’s the propigation map as I compose this last sentence. The green areas are SSB and Morse Code areas I could reach if I had more power from my grid square CN73td (the star.)
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