[Elecraft] just 500W ?

[Wayne Burdick]

> The shirt I wear sometimes in the hamfests says up front : "Life is  
> too short for QRP"

In stark contrast, the first "rig" I built, when I was 13, was a 200- 
milliwatt-output crystal oscillator that used half a dozen parts with  
their leads twisted together. No PCB, no solder, no box. It was ugly.  
But it worked.

I connected a hand key and a battery in series, paid out a roll of guy  
wire and tossed it on the roof, then started listening around the  
rig's 40-m frequency with my Hallicrafters SX101. A guy up in Los  
Angeles was calling CQ, and when he came back to me, I nearly fell off  
my chair. 200 miles on 200 mW, with an unmatched wire laying on the  
roof and a 9-V battery!

A few months later someone gave me an HT37 transmitter (100 W). First  
thing I did was turn the drive down to nearly zero, measured my output  
at 200 mW, and worked New York (2500 miles) on 20 m.

Life's not too short for *that* :)

OTOH, I'm quite proud of our engineering staff's achievement with the  
KPA500.

Wayne
N6KR