Turkish Delight – QRP Style!

It was a long, long wait. I ordered my QRP Labs QMX factory assembled radio on the 9th of October 2023 and received it on the 4th of April 2024 – a wait of a little under 6 months. I guess I shouldn’t complain, a fellow club member waited 18 months for his Elecraft KX2 to arrive.

What really surprised me was that my new little companion came from Turkey. I ordered it from QRP Labs in the UK. QRP Labs is a small company owned by Hans Summers G0UPL. I haven’t been able to find out anything about the company but, according to QRZ.com, Hans lives in the “posh” village of Forest Row south of London. QRP Labs’ products are assembled, and shipped from Turkey. Is QRP Labs a one-man outfit with a Turkish production contractor? Hans is certainly a design genius and maintains a hands-on approach to supporting his products through a busy groups.io forum.

I don’t usually give names to my radios, but this one has already been christened “Tiny Turk”. I had ordered the fully assembled unit because my aging eyes aren’t up to the task of soldering all those closely packed components and, besides, I no longer have the steady hands needed for the job. I have heard that if you order the kit it arrives much more quickly. If you have good eyes, steady hands, a high quality soldering station and plenty of time you may choose to go that route.

Along with the radio I ordered an enclosure – it is a very smart extruded aluminum box; it looks fairly rugged too – as a true field radio should be! I also ordered a power connector. It is a 2.1mm barrel jack with about 6 inches of wire. The conductor size of the wire is tiny – but then so is the current consumption of the radio! I crimped 15A Powerpole connectors on the other end of the wire. It seemed like a massive overkill but I don’t know if Powerpole connectors are available for Tiny Turk’s miniscule current rating (700mA for 5 watts out at 12VDC). Also in the package was a test sheet with the RF output measurements and a small QRP Labs key tag made from circuit board material – cute!

The QMX is indeed a very small radio but it packs a lot of features into its small size. And the interesting thing is that it is still under development. More features are on the drawing board. Currently the QMX supports CW and digital modes. Later on it will support SSB too. A tiny microphone is already installed. I am a 100% CW operator and I doubt SSB will gain much traction in the QRP world after the upcoming solar maximum has faded into the history books, but it’s nice to know that support for phone will be available if needed. All upgrades to the QMX are available by installing new firmware.

Why did I buy this radio?

I am not sure I can easily answer that question. Frankly I have always preferred big radios. By that I mean physically big radios – even if they are still low power. Radios with big easy to read controls. When sitting on a rock in the backcountry being eaten alive by mosquitoes and various other winged pestilences, keeping an eye open in case I have encroached on the territory of a black bear who may urge me to relocate, I need a radio that is easy to operate. Does the QMX fit that bill? My first impression is that maybe it does. Furthermore, if a two hundred pound momma bear appears with cubs in tow and expresses her wish for me to leave – in the manner that only a fearsomely protective mother bear can do – my Tiny Turk can be thrown into a pocket while I execute a hasty tactical retreat.

But does it really need to be so small?

Now that’s a very good question. One of the reasons I decided to purchase the QMX was to replace my 20-year-old Hendricks PFR3 QRP CW radio. The PFR3 is a small radio with a built-in manual tuner and can also be used with an internal battery. The QMX is even smaller but it does not incorporate a tuner or a battery. I have a couple of superb manual QRP tuners, built from kits many years ago, that could be paired with my new little Turkish friend. Whichever one I choose will at least double the size of my QMX-based field rig. And then I still need a battery too!

Powering the QMX

I learned the tough lesson that when a manufacturer says his radio is a 12-volt radio he means 12 volts, not 13.8 volts. Not even 12.6 volts or whatever a fully-charged battery measures. Exceed that voltage and strange things happen. When I first started using my PFR3 I powered it with a 12V, 7AH gel cell. I like to keep my field batteries freshly charged so that gel cell battery could be anywhere between 12 volts to well over 13 volts. My PFR3 would intermittently – and unexpectedly – transmit one of my stored CW messages with no intervention on my part and often in the middle of a QSO!

Recently, I tamed the beast by inserting a diode voltage limiter in the DC power supply lead and switched to a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery which maintains a constant voltage until it is nearly fully depleted. I have also tried using a buck converter to keep a constant voltage level, but these devices use an oscillator which could potentially radiate and create RFI.

What size battery to use? A typical field operating session for me involves a POTA activation lasting up to an hour. If we assume a 50/50 transmit/receive ratio, then the radio will be drawing 700mA on transmit for 30 minutes and 80mA on receive for 30 minutes. Total power consumed will be less than 400mAH. Technically speaking it will be even less because, during transmit, the radio will switch back to receive between each of the dits and dahs. That depends on the speed of sending, the latency of the T/R switching and whether full break-in or semi-break-in has been set.

Too complicated, so let’s assume 500mAH, then double it for a reasonable safety margin. Is it possible to buy a 1AH LFP battery? The smallest LFP I could find was from Bioenno and it is 3AH but the form factor matches the radio. An alternative would be to use 8 AA cells. These are available very inexpensively and can be bought in packs of 36 or even 48 cells. Whichever route is chosen, the size of the field rig has now tripled; so I ask again – does the QMX really need to be so small?

Well, here’s one way of looking at it. I could carry the QMX in one pocket, the tuner in another, the battery in a third pocket and a wire antenna in a fourth pocket. Hey, my cargo pants have six pockets; that means I could carry my paddle key and earbuds too. No backpack required, how’s that for portability and stealth?

Loving the Tiny Turk

The QMX is probably the most sophisticated radio I have ever owned. My Yaesu FT-891 may have more features and covers more bands (160-6m versus for 80, 60, 40, 30, 20m for the low band version of QMX) but it seems quite old compared to the leading edge technology of the QMX.

During bench tests of the Tiny Turk I noticed faint clicks on key down. According to reports on the QRP Labs groups.io site this glitch has been worse in the past. There have been suggestions made for ways to eliminate the clicks that I haven’t tried yet. Even if suggested remedies are ineffective, the clicks are too faint to be a problem.

Although I have powered up the Tiny Turk and adjusted some of the settings, it hasn’t yet met the fire and brimstone of a POTA pile-up. But, at this early stage, I can report that the tiny little fella is a welcome addition to the VA3KOT stable and will get a first outing very soon.

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