This month I rediscovered my Elecraft K1, a little gem of a radio and the first quality kit that genuinely gave me a fully featured and high performing CW transceiver. When I originally built it I had aerials for 80m & 20m so I built it to cover these two bands. Now I almost exclusively operate on 40m & 30m so I decided to get a new two band board kit. I also wanted to perform the backlight mod for the little LCD display as it can be a bit hard to see in the low lighting of the shack at night. Shipping from Elecraft in the US was almost the same cost as the band board + backlight kit so I opted to purchase from the excellent QRPproject in Germany.

It took about 2.5 hours to build the band board plus another 30 minutes to align it. The picture to the left shows the K1 with the new backlight kit which is fantastic but not a job for the feint of heart!