QRP From There to Here
QRP is simply low-power operation (5 watts or less on CW and 10 watts or less on single sideband or other voice modes).1 This article is my QRP history. I’ve been licensed since the mid-1960s and have had an on-again, off-again love affair with QRP operation. My first recollection of using QRP was at St. Peter High School, in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1965. Although our club station at WB2SKY featured a Heathkit DX-100 (Photo A), we also had a homebrew, one-tube transmitter built on an exposed aluminum chassis. The transmitter with its 807 “valve” (Photo B) was strictly for CW. I worked a number of stations on 40 meters from our rooftop shack. That ended when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded the club a “pink slip” for being heard on 7, 14, and 21 MHz simultaneously. Ooops.
The 807 Harmonic Generator was shut down forever. Fast forward about 20 years to the founding of the New Jersey QRP Club <http://njqrp.club>. We began meeting monthly in the food court of a small shopping center in the Princeton, New Jersey area. George Heron, N2APB, and Joe Everhart, N2CX (SK), pioneers of QRP design and kitting, gathered dozens of hams in a three-state region. With interesting talks and a wealth of idea-sharing, the club created a number of QRP rigs and accessories (Photo C), some as small as a can of breath mints!
George and Joe transformed their ideas into lists of electronic parts and circuit boards. Members took home bulk quantities of these parts in order to create packages of material needed to build whatever the kit was designed to do. These completed sets of parts were then offered for sale to the
