The Small Wonder Labs SW+ 40 FINALLY enclosed

As a gift to myself for finishing my degree, I bought a ham radio kit from Small Wonder Labs (http://www.smallwonderlabs.com/) and  began putting it together.  (Logical thing to do, right?)  Now, YEARS later, it is finally complete and I have screwed it into the box.  The enclosure was a serial port switch box that I picked up at the MIT Swapfest for $2.  It was beige.  I stripped it and painted it a very dangerous shiny black.  As for the radio, the alignment turned out not to be difficult and I reckon I am putting out more than one watt.  Not more than two.  Tuning spans 36KHz (7.085 thru 7.121MHz).

The SW+ series is pretty amazing because it has been exhaustively documented and explained online.  There are not many electronics kits you can find with part-by-part descriptions of how it works.  (http://www.qsl.net/kf4trd/faq.html, http://www.k7qo.net/).

The radio has no dial or visual frequency display, so I soldered in the SWL “Freq-Mite” frequency counter.   When I push the button on the front, the transmit frequency comes into the headphones in Morse code.  Which is pretty clever.

Now, to improve my coding speed…