There's also the problem of the "homebrew only" law which
rules my station.
We should not look askance at ALL "store-bought" technology.
Sometimes, recycled gear is nearly as satisfying as
homebrewed, especially if it's recycled from the dust
bin.
Don't get me wrong, I don't look askance at store-bought technology at all,
nor have anything against it or any other aspect of amateur radio. Some
people are committed QRP enthusiasts. I am mostly QRP but sometimes if condx
are bad and I want to get through to a friend I turn the 80m CW TX
up to its maximum 10W and I
don't feel bad about it.
There are so many aspects to amateur radio, each ham has his own areas of
interest. Some hate CW, others operate it exclusively. To each his own! But
my own passion is to homebrew everything.
For really extreme homebrew, I hope one day to build a valve transmitter and
matching receiver using components which are all constructed from household
items or things that can be purchased from the hardware store. Every
component: valves from baby food jars, capacitors from kitchen foil, etc
etc. See for
the capacitor I built, the only part so far.
But that's just me - people who operate QRQ QRO black box contest stations
don't bother me either. Unless it's a time such as once happened when I was
in QSO with an SM6 on 80m, 2-way QRP CW and both about 339 or something
rather marginal, and midnight GMT comes around and suddenly the whole place
explodes with contest traffic and the SM6 and myself, well we both got
practically vapourised by the volume of the audio in our receivers. Had to
curse them a bit then ;-)
73 Hans G0UPL
