Did I mention that I just received my new Elecraft KX3 (#5522) ham transceiver? Wonderful rig (but more on that in another post). The KX3 ships with your choice of a USB cable or a serial cable for interfacing with your PC. With either of these cables, you can use Elecraft’s KX3 Utility software to update the KX3’s firmware, or you can otherwise control the rig with suitable software (say, Ham Radio Deluxe) running on your PC. At any rate, I received the USB cable with my KX3.

I’m interested to see if I can rig up a bluetooth connection between my KX3 and my Android tablet, though, and it seemed that a good place to start would be to fabricate a serial cable, to which I could ultimately connect a serial-to-bluetooth adapter of some sort. Here’s how I did it.

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I finally finished the Survivor. Truthfully, I thought I finished it over two weeks ago, but I didn’t take it to the field with me for QRP to the Field this year like I planned because, well, my plans changed. I still went out for QRPTTF, though, which is what counts. I picked up the Survivor again when I got back, ostensibly to make sure it was all ready for use. And it’s a good thing I did–it was definitely not working right.

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In a previous post I told you about my purchase of the Survivor 75-meter SSB/CW rig from Hendricks QRP Kits. I’m taking a “build a little, test a little” approach to building this kit, having a great time and learning a bunch of stuff. I’ve been making some notes and adding them to my site. If you’re interested, here’s the main page for those notes. So far I’ve built up the voltage regulation, VFO, BFO, TX/RX switching, tune mode oscillator, and the balanced modulator. My goal is to have this thing completed and ready for QRP to the Field on April 27th. If this is the kind of thing that interests you, check back every few days for updates.

So, it’s been quite a while since I did any significant electronics construction. The reason is probably that it’s been a while since a new kit has come along that interested me enough to want to build it. Sure, there are plenty of ham radio kits out there, but I’ve built plenty of CW transceivers and really don’t feel like I need another one. But when Doug, KI6DS announced a new SSB/CW transceiver kit over at QrpKits.com earlier this year, my interest peaked. Dubbed the “Survivor,” it’s a fairly compact but usable rig for the trail. I decided to take the plunge and placed my order, and I’ve just begun the building process. I’m documenting the build as I go, trying to learn a few things about its design along the way. You can follow along if you’re interested:

Building the Survivor

I’ll be adding to the content as I get farther along on the build. Comments and corrections are always welcome!