My club has been doing a lot to encourage members to obtain their General. We sponsor POTA events, have a group of POTA mentors who will get them on the air in a park, and general mentors that will help with things like antennas.
I’ve been helping out by doing short presentations at our monthly meetings that touch upon QRP; things like radios, antennas, power supplies, CW, digital modes, etc. I already had a pretty extensive collection of various QRP radios, many of them kits, and have been keeping my eyes open for something new to try.
Recently I ran across Jonathan KM4CFT’s CFT1 5-band CW QRP rig. It is about the same form factor as the small QRP-lab kits (like the QMX), just a tad thicker. However, what struck me right off the bat was the simplicity of the user interface that seemed designed around what a POTA CW operator would need. You don’t have to dig into menus for the obvious stuff like tuning rate, band switching, and CW MEMORIES. It comes in both a kit ($330) and assembled ($400) version.
I received mine yesterday, a couple of weeks after I ordered it (no doubt Hamvention caused some of that delay). I had a chance to put it on the air on 20-meters today.
My first observation was it was one of the quietest receivers I’ve used – not a bunch of digital switching noise. In fact, without an antenna connection it was almost dead quiet. But with the antenna hooked up, the background noise came up (something that doesn’t happen on many other QRP radios which have a poor noise floor). The first thing I checked was the MDS. The weakest signal I could generate was -127 dBm. That’s equal to 0.1uV. Amazingly I could hear the signal easily. I was impressed!
I did some quick measurements:
- MDS better than-127 dBm
- RX current draw 80ma (backlight on)
- TX draw 0.93 Amps (14.020 MHz)
- Power out 6.0 watts (at 13.0 volts)
Sadly the band was pretty much dead, but I look forward to trying to work some stations later in the afternoon.
