CC1 kit inventory

The CC1 kit arrived yesterday, a day earlier than I expected. First impression after I took everything out of the mailing box and laid the bags out was that there are a lot of components, and holy crap are they small.

CC1 Parts
CC1 Parts

The components are pretty much all SMT components, and a lot smaller than the ones that were used in the Softrock receiver. There are also lots of transformers and inductors to wind.

CC1 caps and toroids
CC1 caps and toroids

I’m going to have to clean up and organize the workbench before I get started on this. I’m thinking I should do the assembly on a towel or something with sides for containment, because if I accidentally drop one of the SMT bits, it’s going to be next to impossible to find.

New kit: CC1

A new radio kit is on the way and should be here by the weekend. Ordered a beta version of the CC1 QRP transceiver kit from Jason/NT7S. Looking forward to getting it and blogging the build here. It’s small with a lot of SMT components, so I’ll definitely be stretching my soldering skills with it. Learned a lot by doing the Softrock Lite receiver, so I think I should be able to manage pretty well with this one.

DXing

Spent some time playing on the radio during the ARRL DX contest over the weekend and added about 40 more contacts to the log. Spent most of my time working on 10m where there seemed to be a lot of good propagation today. Lots of DX stations, not a lot of noise like I usually hear. 10m is an interesting band where I heard the DX stations pretty clearly, but didn’t hear any of the stations they were working, aside from maybe a few out on the west coast.

Early in the day when I started, most of the stations I was hearing were across the Atlantic. I think the farthest stations I worked were US5D in the Ukraine and LZ9W in Bulgaria. Later on in the afternoon and evening there were a lot of Carribean and South American contacts although some of the louder (1kW) European stations could still be heard. I even managed to work a Venezuelan station who said he was operating 5W QRP (YW2LV). Pretty impressive.

Had fun with the DX contest. Maybe next time I’ll try to get some more contacts logged.

Assembling the shack

Spent a bit of time decorating the shack today in between contacts for the ARRL DX contest. The two big maps at the top are CQ and ITU DX zone maps. On the right for easy reference is the ARRL band plan/WAS map, country prefix list and US grid square maps.

The shack
The shack

Still need to tidy up the cable clutter around the radio a bit but I’m liking the way things are set up so far. Have the radio sending audio into some surplus computer speakers, and headphones handy for playing on the radio without disturbing the rest of the house.

Still need to finish setting up the logging station. In the meantime, it’s paper logging.