Ham Radio Homebrew Hack Chat with ZL2CTM on 3/18

QCX Kit Giveaway!

Project Brownie is Complete!

It's complete, and it's for sale! Details in the video below

Last year I introduced Project Brownie: The quest to imagine what a spy radio, made with technology that wouldn’t emerge for another half century, would have looked like in the 1960’s. To do this, I”d need some parts, some creativity, and some tools.

A QCX from QRP Labs

The radio I chose is a QRP Labs QCX for 20 meters. It’s compact, high performance, and just belongs in a spy radio! To get the parts all lined up so that they could be flush mounted together, I made some modifications to the volume knob and encoder mountings:

I also removed the switches and mounted in 0.1″ sockets in their place, and then removed the BNC connector. I broke away all the plastic an mounted it directly to RG174, which also connects via a 0.1″ header connector.

Testing it out

After tuning it up, I noticed it was getting only about 2W output. On the 20M QCX, the solution is to remove some windings from the Low Pass Filter. I did that, and it worked fine with a full 5W output.

For tools, I used a small drill but to do the fine work of cutting out the front panel, I used a Rotary Tool Kit that I bought on Amazon. They don’t have the exact one, but there’s a few like it here: Rotary Tool Kit on Amazon (Affiliate Link). I only paid about $35 for mine last year, and it’s legitimately good! I’ve always wanted one, and it really came in handy for this project.

See it in Action and Subscribe to us on YouTube

Edit: It’s been sold. That’s right- this project is for sale! I don’t have a use for it. I did it just for fun and haven’t had time to learn CW. I’d like at least $100+ Shipping for it as it’s fully tested and built and ready to go on the air, even with an ULTRA cool spy radio case. To buy it, email me with an offer at geocrasher at gmail.com. See it in action in the video below:

2 comments

    • Bill on March 24, 2020 at 11:34 PM
    • Reply

    Is it still available?

    1. It is! I’ll email you.

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