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Reviews For: Hendrix NADC CW transceiver

Category: Ham Radio Kits

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Review Summary For : Hendrix NADC CW transceiver
Reviews: 3MSRP: $130.00
Description:
40 meter CW Transceiver kit
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.qrpkits.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0032.7
WA1KBE Rating: 2010-11-19
Challenging to build satisfying to operate Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
I purchased a NADC 40 kit with the digital readout option at Dayton. It is a challenging kit to assemble - especially the all surface mount digital frequency display. With the aid of a stereo microscope I successfully got the counter assembled and it worked as expected. The main kit itself has a lot of parts in it. I found the monolithic ceramic bypass capacitors supplied were of the wrong value. A email to Hendrix despatched the correct replacement components to me. Assembly of the main board was time consuming as there are a lot of components to populate. I spead the assembly time over about 6 weeks carefully checking my work as I progressed. I did experience several instances where the assembly guide contradicted the pictorial and the schematic was used to determine what component to put into place. When I initially fired the transceiver up I had only 1 watt output. After several hours of trouble shooting I found I had installed a bypass capacitor to ground per the assembly instructions that the schematic and pictorial clearly said to omit. Upon removing the offending cap the power output jumped to 3+ watts. How does it work? One word - excellent! No drift and a very sweet note on CW. I am amazed at how good the receiver is in such a simple QRP rig. My first QSO was with a PY in Brazil! I have since worked many European stations and lots of state side stations with the rig. It was a lot of work to assemble and may be best attempted by very experienced kit builders. I am very pleased with the end result - well worth the time and effort.
WA4FOM Rating: 2010-11-12
Very frustrating kitbuilding experience. Keep the parts! Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
I don't ordinarily post really bad reviews unless
I have a VERY bad experience with a product.
Well, here's one. I don't claim to be the guru
of gurus on kitbuilding, but I've probably built
several hundred kits dating all the way back to
my Heath HW-101, which I bought back in high school instead of my class ring.

No regrets.

I eventually gave up trying to build the NADC-40
because kitbuilding is supposed to be pleasant
and educational. I found:

- Several missing parts

- Broken parts (1 ceramic cap)

- Incorrect parts (ceramic caps again
and not just 1 or 2)

- Parts don't fit into the holes on the
PCB (capacitor lead spacing too wide)

The junk box yielded the parts I needed without
having to resort to contacting Hendricks, but
when I saw that I was going to have to "factory
adjust" a number of components to get them to
fit on the board (and likely damaging at least
1 or 2 of them, as they were - you guessed it -
fragile ceramic caps). The NADC parts will
find new lives in other projects, but not this
one.

I sincerely hope the other kits Hendricks sells
are better implemented than this one.

W3WA Rating: 2010-09-18
Problems with assembly manual Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
The radio preforms just as it should, but there are some errors in the assembly manual that might cause some builders a lot of un-necessary work and problems. I sent an email to Hendricks kits over a month ago and pointed out the errors. To date no corrections have been made to the assembly manual. The errors are:
The schmatic says that capacitor C49 is not used, the assembley instructions say to install capacitor C49.
The assembly instructions say to adjust the turns on inductors L6 and L7 to get proper power output. The correct inductors are L1 And L2.
The instructions say to add a capactor to the C38 location to lower the oscillator frequency. The correct location is the C37 location.
I point these errors to hopefully help others avoid a lot of work tracing the circutit to find the potential source of problems caused by assembly errors..