s-pixie

Well, after thinking about it, and using all the tools at my disposal, including colorful language, I managed to get the old S8050 out of the S-Pixie kit. Now, I've been buying component assortments for years. I figure that if I want to build my own equipment, especially equipment of my own design, I'll need parts and it's better to buy cheap assortments well in advance than to order the specific parts that I think I want. I mean, the fact that I have, say, an S8050 transistor, that can guide my designs to use parts that I have rather than be overwhelmed by all the parts that there are.

I was on Twitter the other, well, year. and I saw that Richard GW1JFV had posted a photo of something he'd gotten in the mail. It was a kit from http://lxqqfy.com. They're a Chinese outfit that makes electronics kits for radio amateurs. Now, I'm always a sucker for a cheap kit, as evidenced by the assortment of unbuilt kits I have on my shelves, and they've reproduced some classic kits that are no longer available elsewhere. So, in my ongoing effort to actually establish two-way radio contact using gear I built myself, I bought an S-Pixie.

A year or two ago, I bought a dummy load kit at the Texas City Hamfest. It's basically a bunch of 1K 3W resistors, a mason jar, a couple of perforated metal disks, and an SO-239. Some assembly required. I made some changes to the design, replacing the SO-239 with a BNC connector, and adding BNC connectors for sample and AM envelope detector outputs, and it's now done. The guy who sold me the kit gave me way more than 20 resistors, though, so I have a bunch of 3W resistors left over, not to mention the fact that I misplaced the resistors so I bought even more.