IARU 2nd place... unbelievable

Yeeeessss!

No idea how. The results were quite promising but as I remember my rotator broke in the middle of the contest and whenever I wanted to change antenna direction I had to ...run and do it manually.

And the conditions were not very special...
And the count of far stations was not impressive...
And no Japan and Australia in log like years before...

But had one more antenna - delta for 40 meters.

Honestly no idea what has happened but I'm on the second place in the World in IARU 2016.

True that in most unliked category - QRP PHONE. Count of stations was maybe not impressive... But this is first time when I'm better than #6 or #7. And this is a second place. Great feeling :)))

JUMA TRX1 ...ready!

After some time spent in some box (counted in years rather than months) I approached Juma TRX1.

Thanks to Piotr SP8QEP who convinced me that hot air smd soldering is not such difficult as it seems to be I tried to solder first test smd elements.

At the beginning nothing worked. The connection points instead of nice and shiny looked like the rock from volcano...

The reason was the solder paste which was probably just too old. I bought new paste in some shop in the city and since then everything went smooth.

Finally I find hot air soldering as fast and reliable way of building electronic devices. Just the size of elements should be 1206 or similar - smaller are just too small.


For the first test I decided to solder the keyer (is the smallest and in the worst case I could live without it)...

Before soldering with the paste ready for hot...

After soldering:

These elements are really small...

Main pcb before hot air...

And after....

PA

Box...

DDS seems to be working from the first try...

Now connect everything...

More connections..

Finally tuning and alignment

Well, finally I was lost with some dimensions (display) and will have to correct it but the whole radio works from first try...