I recently purchased a Pixie Ham Radio kit, after hearing about it on a recent Longmont Amateur Radio Club Tuesday night Hamlet Net
It was enjoyable to take it from a bag of parts to actually transmitting CW!
Here’s the YouTube video of the sausage-making process:
This is the S-Pixie which is different than the original version of the Pixie because this one contains a LED and Piezoelectric buzzer so that you can see and hear your transmission.
From start to finish, it took me 3.5 hours. The longest and hardest part was laying out the capacitors and resistors so that I knew what went where. If the parts were already laid out correctly then I think I could probably do it in 1/2 hour.
I ordered it on eBay or maybe Amazon. It was only maybe around $12 and came with a 7.023Mhz crystal, which is squarely in the US Amateur Extra band. No problem for me but I’m super slow at CW as I’m learning so I also ordered a set of crystals for other parts of the 40 meter band that may be a little more tolerant of slow-coders like me 🙂
I think this is a fun kit to attempt as long as you have a cheap component tester (which I also got on Amazon for around $15). The best part about it is that once you’re done, you’ve built a working CW-only ham radio that actually works!
I’m already thinking about buying other kits but I must curb my enthousiasm since I need to become proficient at Morse Code before I spend even more money on tiny SOTA gear.
73,
ae0rs
