QRP Radio Fun

At some point over the winter, I started reading Thomas’s posts at QRPer.com. It may have been after I listened to one of his guest appearances on Ham Radio Workbench.

Long story short, last week I got a new Xiegu X6100 from Radioddity. I’ve been playing with it and a MFJ-1984LP EFHW antenna in the front yard for a few days now, and it’s been a hoot to chase POTA activators using only 5W. It’s definitely something I can do for 5 (let’s be serious, more like 15) minutes at a time in between other things.

Some early notes, maybe to follow up on in the future:

• There are at least two groups.io lists for this radio, either of which might help you find an answer to a question. Please note that if you haven’t bought the radio yet, stay away from posts before Spring 2022–the early adopters had some issues that no longer apply.
  • https://groups.io/g/xiegu-x6100/
  • https://groups.io/g/x6100/
• The thin poly line used by arborists can burn when you release it from your hand, maybe use gloves when tossing (or get a lighter throw bag).
• My antenna is allegedly good for a bunch of bands, but I’m also not sure how the tuner will tell me that it can’t tune.
• The detent in the main tuning knob is either too small for my finger, or the whole knob is too small. I tend to just roll my finger around the edge to spin fast.
• The manual is useful to expand out the menu item names, but you need to know a bit about radios to know what they actually mean.
• Some weird “birdies” that swoop in from the sides, on some bands. See notes in the groups.io posts.
• CW decode doesn’t always work, but you may have to toggle between CW and CWR by pressing the mode button. Or it’s random chance that I got it to work.
• My attic fan dipole, although it covers everything from 40m to 10m bands, is not very sensitive on receive at all (or more likely is catching too much noise from inside the house). Yesterday I could see stations all over 20m when operating outside on the X6100, but only a few of them inside on the IC-7300 (which should have better receive in general).
  • I don’t think this is because of bad coax, but it could be. I made some notes on my Mastodon account (that I need to write down somewhere else) about testing the IC-7300 with the EFHW and checking the noise floor.