My Shot at the Pixie Transceiver 

Tip for the battery life Use a 12 Volt battery with diodes in series to bring the voltage down to 9 volts I do it all the time for other radios it works very well for Me DE KB8UGP Gary P.S. use a Rechargeable Battery ! have a good day and good DX'ing 73

A great part of the learning experience and well presented. I have two pixies to build, one will be standard and the other will have a few mods, so I can compare.

I bought one of the deluxe Pixie's already assembled and it came with a hand full of different crystals. It was fun to play with but I was never able to make any contacts on it. So it just sits in a box in the closet. I like my Xiegu X6100 though. Think I'm going to donate the Pixie and some other radio equipment to Handy Ham.

I have 3 pixies so I can experiment. I love listening to them and trying to pick out all the different QSO going on. It’s like 4 people talking at once. I love that. I assumed it was due to know filtering. I wonder it is actually pulling in harmonic from 20 meters. I also love the occasional am broadcast that fades in and out while I’m listening.

Thanks for posting. I learned straight key just to use my pixie. I don’t have a stand alone keyer. Started at 15 wpm. C is the hardest character for me. Anyway I made a contact 79 miles away. I am now into practicing straight key. I learned morse code strictly on iambic keys. I stopped at 32 wpm since I don’t want to get faster than that. Learning at a fast rate makes it difficult to slow down. But the pixie forced me to learn slow straight keying.

Wow thanks for posting this. You had so many great tips on how use the pixie. Especially about the battery life. I have the same one. The signal gets out great. I use the internal battery pack from my KX2. You can also use a remote reciever to see how your signals sound. 73 de 4X6FB 🇮🇱

I like the Pixie, simple yet effective. Be aware there seem to be several manufacturers of the Pixie. When plugging in the headphones my audio shorted to earth and I had to cut the copper track to prevent it shorting. I destroyed the jack socket when removing it to confirm the problem. I put mine on 5.262 MHz. Best dx so far 180 miles with a SWL report for that QSO at 220 miles from Utrecht. 350 mW out. G4GHB.

You may find that the coupling capacitor between the oscillator and pa is too large a value. The original version called for 100pF, not the 10nF/100nF that you find in these kits.

Just toss an LM317 on a small piece of metal for a heatsink. Then hook it up to a 12/14V battery and dial its output down to 9 Volts. There's no reason to burn up expensive 9V batteries, especially as many of them these days that say "9V" are only specifying the form factor of 9V, and they only put out a bit over 8 volts. Besides, the internal battery resistance causes a voltage drop when you key, which causes the frequency of the oscillator to drift. A stiff supply voltage from a lead-acid or Lithium and a voltage regulator will help stabilize the Pixie's oscillator and provide a cleaner CW note. I'm an Extra, but I figured the odds of many other Extras hanging out on that frequency listening for a slow, weak, dirty-sounding CW note wasn't all that high. On the other hand, that is the only frequency that a lot of these kits are crystalled for, so if there are any other Extras willing to work a Pixie that's exactly where they'll be listening. The signal that you have radiating on receive is due to the RF output transistor also being used as the receive mixer. It leaks out quite noticeably. That was a problem for years with regenerative receivers. You can block it by adding a low gain receive preamp in line with the antenna, and using relay switching between Xmit and receive to bypass the preamp. The beauty of the Pixie lies in how bad, but functional it is. Because it works, but it has such glaring problems that it inspires the builder to fix the problems, one at a time. For instance, the AM broadcast interference can be solved by simply adding an LC in series to ground using a tunable capacitor or inductor to ground on the antenna lead-in. Just tune until the Am station goes away. Use 2 or more such circuits and tune out each offending station. Or simply look up a passive BCB blocking filter circuit online, build it and stick it in the antenna lead-in. There are simple, inexpensive mods all over the web to fix or minimize most obnoxious Pixie problems. I even added an SI-5351 circuit to mine, and a frequency display with TX/RX offset, (after I got the noise out of the display to make the Pixie happy.) That allowed me to cover the entire 40 meter band with digital frequency accuracy and stability. That should allow me to even use it for digital modes, especially since I built a board using a crystal oven reference, though I haven't tried it yet. I suspect there are hams who have managed WAS Awards on Pixies. It just requires a few small mods, RF knowledge, a good antenna, and some patience. You might try building about a 3 foot diameter tunable mag-loop with a low RF resistance, (fat tubing.) That will boost the Q and make the antenna very narrow-band, and solve a lot of bleed-over problems from high-power stations. I suggest to all of the hams I Elmer that they build Pixies when they get their General license. They cost less than $10 to build, and solving all of the irritating little quirks quickly teach the noobs all sorts of things about radio, and leads them to start experimenting, which has always been the heart and soul of amateur radio, (not to mention what the FCC intended for the service when they authorized it). I wanted more frequency agility on my Pixie, so I added an SI5351 circuit in place of the crystal, along with a display, which was noisy, so I had to figure out how to quiet the display.Lots to learn in the ham radio hobby. Plugging in $15,000 worth of appliances and talking around the world is the smallest facet of the hobby and entirely lacks the satisfaction of a 4,000 mile QSO between 2 hams running modified Pixies. I tell my students that after they've played with their Pixies for a couple of months and solved some of the problems with them they will have a much better idea of what attributes they might want in a more expensive rig if they decide they want to buy or build one. I learned on the unlicensed 1750 meter band that I could blanket 1/3 of the lower 48 states every day with an ERP of 5 mW and a 25 foot vertical, a lot less power than a Pixie. I just needed to know what I was doing. So now my 100 Watt HF rigs and amps just sit and gather dust and I build and modify little rigs built from junk-box parts, and I have a ball with them. 73

Well Scott be fair to me (WA0FSE). I do have several kits to build...which I am looking forward to doing during the winter months....I have built 3 QRP Labs QCX transcievers....one of them a mini. I also do have a pixie which I certainly intent build now....and the one I could not remember the name of is Frog Sounds....which is probably much like the Pixie. I am glad you pointed out the crystal conundrum.....Many would probably not be aware of the problem and end up buying one that is in the extra class band and not be able to use it.

I built a Pixie s3 kit which had a piezo sounder for side tone. 9volts was not enough to get it going. Had to use12 volt. Only 200mW but changed tr2 directly for a 2n3866 and it’s now 600mW. Also used 7030 xtal as this is the watering hole in Uk/Europe. 73 de G4BTI.

Really enjoyed the video! The excitement when that station came back to you must've been a great feeling. Next time you go QRV with it, shoot me a text and I'll see if I can't pick you up down here in the Big State. I won't be able to come back to you but it would be neat to see if I can copy you here. 73!

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