Produce a 25 watt PA and LIPO battery pack for the whole combination and you will have a winner. If you also have a MANPACK frame that includes the radio, amp and tuner you will have winner.
If you wanted to take the radio to the next level. You can make a ready to go HF station by combining 2 X 25 watt PA's, antenna tuner, DC to DC converter 10 to 50 volts, AC power pack 90 to 260 volts as portable radio setup.
50 watts is enough for portable/maritime/holiday/pedestrian mobile and casual operation. Pedestrian mobile is becoming very popular. The ham companies do very little market research and most of their designers dont actually use
the equipment that they design. The end result is you end up with useless equipment that is far from flexible.
5 watts output on SSB is almost close to useless with simple portable antennas. Portable SSB starts to wakeup at about 25 watts of power. On CW 5 watts is effective.
Bottom line is that if you design flexible equipment that can be configured for many styles of operation you will have a sales winner. Your transceiver design looks like a winner for building a good portable HF station platform.
The military have been optimizing their HF portable radios for decades, the result is the HF manpack the most practical portable radio you can find. All ham designers can come up with is useless cutesy radios that are not effective
at doing what they supposed to be doing, that is communicating because they so poorly designed or largely impractical for operating from any other place besides being a near a car or picnic table. The HF pedestrian mobile pioneers from the UK like G4AKC shows the kind of design expertise and lateral thinking thats needed.
New QRP RADIO: X1M QRP SSB/CW Transceiver $299
http://www.wouxun.us/item.php?item_id=302&category_id=65I saw this selling on Ebay for $350 now as well as
$299 at the Wouxun website. This is a
5 watt SSB/CW radio that promises all the ham bands however it lists only 5 bands with something about 'configured separately with additional filtering'.
(I did a search here on eham for X1M QRP Transceiver and yielded no results, so I guess this radio has not been mentioned yet.) This is an fully assembled radio according to the site.
The website says they are talking orders and it will be
shipping in early May, but some Ebay seller from North Carolina has it now for $350. The price seems great and for the price of a Youkits 4 band CW only rig, this radio appears to offer even more. Seems Wouxun is going to be importing these in to sell in the U.S.. The manufacturer seems to be "Xiegu Technology"
The site goes on to mention that Wouxun.us is now "Import Communications" and that they will be at the Dayton Hamfest North Hall 175-176. I have no connections to these guys whatsoever and just passing on the information that I found.
Specs from the websiteModes: USB & LSB & CW
Power output: 5 Watts
Operating voltage: 9.6 ~ 14.5 vdc
Operating current: 0.35 ~ 1.2 amp
Receiver Preamplifier: Yes
Memory Channels: 100
RIT Function: Yes
Automatic Internal CW Keyer: Yes
Backlight On/Off: Yes
Keyboard lock: Yes
Dimensions: 3-13/16 x 1-9/16 x 6-1/8 inches
Weight: 0.65 kg ~ 1.43 lbs
PTT Microphone: Included
* Transmits on ALL Ham Bands,
Plus 5 Ham Bands are configured separately with additional filtering
Band 1: 3.5 ~ 3.9 MHz
Band 2: 7.0 ~ 7.15 MHz
Band 3: 14.0 ~ 14.5 MHz
Band 4: 21.0 ~ 21.45 MHz
Band 5: 28.0 ~ 29.7 MHz
Receiving sensitivity: better than 0.45uV,
RF output power: ≥ 4.5W
Frequency stability: better than 0.5ppm
Frequency accuracy: better than 0.5ppm
Operating voltage: 12.0 ~ 14.0V DC
Receiver Standby Current: 0.5A
Emission current: 1.5A Max