A day after the birth of my son (12th December) a package arrived from Elecraft! Of course the first week I’ve got something else on my mind but I got anxious soon to heat up the solder iron!
First I read the manual thoroughly and unpacked all bags and packs. According to the manual you have to start with the 4-band filter board. Then build the front panel. Last (but not least) it’s time for the main RF-board. And that’s a biggy!

I don’t know exactly how many hours I spend reading, winding cores and soldering, but it was one great adventure and I really enjoyed building the K1! More then one of my amateur friends asked me why I bought an Elecraft. They are expensive and do not have much functionality (at least the K1 doesn’t). But when you open the package you’ll see the effort and accuracy Elecraft (thank you Susan and Stephanie!) put in to a great kit, you realize not everything is about functionality. It’s probably much cheaper to it put together at Foxcon in China rather to compose a whole kit with a detailed manual.

That said, I was completely surprised about the performance of the K1 after it’s completion and first test run! It’s so simple to operate and the receiving performance blows my previous QRP-rig (Yaesu FT-817) out of the water! I specifically bought the Elecraft K1 for portable operation (maybe SOTA in the future?) with my BuddyPole. And with it’s extremely low power usage (just 58 mA in receiving mode) it should do about 2 or 3 hours on 8 AA-battery’s! That’s a lot better then my previous rig which did only 20 minutes of receiving on the same battery’s (with transmitting even less).

And just one day after finishing the build a package arrived from Rose N7HKW! She made me a great case for the K1. Totally handmade, great materials, absolutely perfect finishing! I’m sure this case is more beautiful and stronger then any case I ever seen! I love it!
Of course the K1 fits perfectly and is really protected when I engage in SOTA-activity 😉

I ordered the K1 with the battery-pack option and the display back lighting kit. The back lighting is build in but the battery pack I still have to build in. The manual said it’s a good idea to wait with that option until I have some experience in operating the radio. So I’ll pick up that later.

Some pictures of the building process, finished K1 and Rose’s great case.