Usage for CW?

[Piper]

Good morning and thanks for letting me join. I do not have one of these amazing little rigs yet, but plan to buy one soon. I'm primarily interested in its capability for CW, my major point of interest in radio. So, any comments or suggestions will be most appreciated. Further, although I have done some kitting in the past I wonder about my ability to wind this many coils and make them efficient. Is it reasonably easy to remove and rewind coils if necessary? And, it looks as though the builder can simply choose any five bands to work in, is that correct? Many thanks. Looking forward to getting on of these and taking an active part here.

[N1CJ]

Hi Piper,
I don't know if this will help, but I'm not very skilled with kit building. I have mediocre soldering skills and basic soldering tools (soldering iron, tweezers, and one of those solder sucker things), and I was able to successfully build the (tr)usdx. Granted, I did make a lot of mistakes, and received a lot of burns from the soldering iron (like I said, mediocre skills). Even so, I was able complete the low-bands version, and the classic bands RF board.

I have just started tuning the Lx1 coils, and I can say it's relatively easy to unsolder the coils and remove turns. You do need to clean out the holes with a solder sucker (you pretty much need 3 hands for this), and then you can solder it back in, test it and do the whole process again if needed. As far as adding coils, the kit comes with extra toroids and enough magnet wire to build at least one more 80m coil.

As far as the bands go, there are only 3 versions of this radio (so not just any 5 bands).
Low bands: 80/60/40/30/20
High bands: 20/17/15/12/10
Classic bands: 80/40/20/15/10

The RF boards come with the capacitors preinstalled, so you have to make the coils that complete those intended filters.

Hope that helps.

[Piper]

Many thanks Christopher. I'll take that good advice and decide soon. I probably past burning myself much but my vision isn't what it used to be. This looks like a pretty easy kit, as kits go, with mostly hardware and toroids to solder. At least there's no 24 pin DIP chips to solder in.... Thanks again, Piper. AG5GW

[N1CJ]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: when tuning the coils, don't ever power up the (tr)usdx without the bottom part of the case in place. It prevents the main board and rf board from touching any parts of each other. The pin header does the same thing on the top, so that's not a problem.

I did kill a mainboard once during the tuning step, even though I used my thumb to keep the boards separated. I don't even think anything really made contact, but it may have arc'd somewhere since the boards were still close.