I finished building this transceiver in March, 2009. In the first 11 days, I made 20 contacts with it, mostly into the New England area, but also to Alabama, Norway, and the Honduras!

The rig is W7EL's Optimized 7 Mcs QRP transceiver, from August 1980 QST, designed by Roy Lewallen. The rcvr sounds great, the xmtr has clean keying, and the output is 1.5 watts. The VFO is stable and tunes from 7 to 7.120. The QSK is absolutely perfect!

After two months, the number of contacts was up to 51, and the dx now includes Italy, Uraine, Cuba, the Cayman Islands and Slovenia!

I've since added a Norcal keyer and vernier drive.

This is what the rig looked like at first. The regulator is at the back, the vfo in the middle, the xmtr on the right, and the mixer on the left. On the extreme right is the low pass filter, and in back of that is the dummy load.

This is a large picture showing details of the construction.

The xmtr is on the left, the vfo in the middle, and the rcvr is on the right.

The rcvr is in the foreground.

This is the rcvr section.

This is the 1.5W output xmtr section.

PA and RF Choke supplying 12V to the collector.

Buffer amp and binocular core.

Diode ring mixer. Trifilar wound binocular cores using a very small #34 gauge wire lifted from an old rf choke. A little Manahttan thrown in with the ugly.

I also tried a TUF-1 mixer, which is the same mixer used in the Elecraft K2. I could not tell the difference, so the diode ring mixer, does the job well.