More Pixie notes

On Sunday night, I made up a power cable, and powered by a 9V battery, I connected the Pixie to my wattmeter and a dummy load. Lo and behold, when I keyed the transmitter, the wattmeter deflected a little. The lowest range on the meter is 20 W, and the lowest division on that range is 0.5 W, and the needle deflection didn’t quite make that mark, so I’m guessing that it’s outputting 300 mW or so into the dummy load.

After that, I connected one of my keyers to the KEY input, and my 40m dipole to the ANT output. When I applied power, I was greeted by a cacophony of signals. The little Pixie can really hear! The problem is that it’s not very selective and I’m hearing signals probably 5 kHz above and below the center frequency. Even so, it was pretty cool to hear.

Finally, I listened for a  while and heard K2MMW calling CQ. I answered him, and he actually came back to me. My first QSO with the Pixie. Unfortunately, my euphoria was short-lived as he failed to come back a second time. My signal either faded on him, or I was overpowered by another station.

Last night, I tried again around 7:30 pm. Perhaps it was too early in the evening, or there just wasn’t anyone on, but I had no luck either answering CQs or calling CQ myself. I did get several ReverseBeacon spots, though, and one of the spots from K1TTT was a 16 dB SNR, which I would guess would be good enough for a QSO. So even though, I didn’t make contact, at least I know that I’m getting out.

What’s next?

I think my next step is to change the crystal in the Pixie to either 7030 kHz or 7114 kHz. I bought crystals for these frequencies from KC9ON for about a buck each. That should put me more in the middle of things. Along with the crystals, he sent a header that will allow me to change frequencies by swapping out the crystals.

I’ve been Tweeting back and forth with KC9ON, and he plans to build a 30m version of the Pixie and offer  some 30m crystals. Operating the Pixie on 30m could be interesting.

To make the thing work on 30m, you have to change the inductor and capacitor in the output filter circuit. KC9ON pointed me towards a blog post that gives values for these components for the different amateur radio bands. That got me to thinking about whether you could make a multi-band version of the Pixie, either by building a board with multiple filters and switching them or by building a tunable pi output circuit. This certainly seems doable, but I’m wondering if it’s worth the effort.