My "Home Made" Challenge.

I have been thinking of challenging myself with respect to (partly, at least) home made transmit and receive equipment used for making minimum one contact or received signal on as many bands, and in as many modes, as I can possibly do.

First my definition on "home made". it can  be a few different things, all involving some thinking or building activity, for example:

- use of equipment not designed for amateur radio, e.g. using a satellite TV LNB for receiving 10GHz amateur radio signals.

- use of modified (possibly surplus) equipment, e.g. using a HB-100 Doppler radar module for transmitting wideband FM or ATV on 10GHz, a home made (or modified) modulator is needed.

- using a kit I built/assembled (maybe modified) myself, e.g. the very simple Pixie transceiver kit.

- building transmitter and/or receiver circuits in non-kit form.

All of this can be arranged in stages, for example:

- building a transmitter and using an available receiver (kit or no kit).

- building a receiver (in addition) (kit or no kit).

- full transceiver (modified, built, kit or no kit).

Right now the status for the "home made" challenge is as follows, for the OZ9QV callsign:

80m: CW TRX, the single frequency - band modified - Pixie kit. - one QSO

60m: CW TRX, the single frequency - band modified - Pixie kit. - one QSO

40m: CW TRX, the single frequency -      unmodified - Pixie kit. - one QSO

This is a long term challenge that I intend to work on, slowly increasing the scope of bands, modes etc. Modes should include CW, Phone (DSB/SSB/AM/FM - DIGI-voice?), Digital modes (e.g. FT8).

Simple monitoring RXs should be included in the challenge, too.

This will involve using many kinds of home made equipment, all the way from simple CW TX,RX to SSB TX,RX.

More than enough projects to keep me busy!

Another part of the challenge is attempting to work 100 contacts, QRO or QRP with home made TX&RX, then 100 DXCC entities, just on a single band.

Challenges not including home made stuff could be 100 contacts or 100 DXCCs with QRP on as many bands as possible.

I could probably dream up other challenges, but let us see what I manage to get done.