Posts Tagged ‘pipit’
Pipit – 15m QRP CW transceiver
March 25th, 2017 | 
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Many years ago I designed and built the Pipit, an 800mW CW transceiver with a direct conversion receiver. It really worked and for some time was my main rig. Used with a low dipole it worked some decent DX. The design was published in GQRP “SPRAT” many years ago.
Sadly, the rig was dismantled some years later. I regret this!
Pipit 15m transceiver
This rig was designed and built many years ago. It spanned some impressive distances and worked well. The receiver was a direct conversion and the gain adjustment was before the mixer, so RF gain could be reduced easily which helped strong signal handling. No RX-TX offset was needed as this was just about right anyway. For quite a time it was the main rig used and every QSO felt like a million dollars! It was written up in GQRP SPRAT a very long time ago (30 years ago?). It is hard to get much more fun than using something this simple and working a long way regularly with it.
Before I had crystals for the CW part of the band my very first QSO was a USA SSB station that I called that was located near Chicago some 4000 miles away. I nearly fell off the chair when he replied. After than I knew anything was possible. I really should rebuild it someday.
It crossed the Atlantic many times. I even used a 10/15m trap dipole (very low) occasionally and never used anything bigger than a low wire dipole. Output power was 800mW, quite enough I found for solid CW QSOs.
