Many years ago, circa 2007, I bought a Hendricks Bitx 20A, 20 meter QRP SSB transceiver kit at the Pacifcon conference in San Ramon, CA. I bought the main kit along with the machined and painted Ten Tec case and KD1JV digital frequency display kit. I figured I would build it over a holiday break from work. That never happened! Finally in July 2022, after having been retired from UCI for 4 years, I sat down to build it.
The instructions were sufficient to build the kit, although experience really helped with parts identification and assembly. Winding the toroids, especially the trifilar toroidal transformers was a little tricky. How do you measure 8 twists per inch of three strands of enameled wire? How important is it for the wire to be twisted at that rate?
Building in sections and testing after each section was completed worked out very well and served as encouragement to keep building to get that next section done so you can see it work. Having a communications service monitor was very helpful in generating and measuring signals.
I’m currently learning how to align the transceiver systematically using instruments.
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