Around the time when I was licensed, in 2004, I purchased a line of Howes equipment at a hamfest. I never got the 10m transceiver to work, but the 80m CW transceiver is a lot of fun. I use it mostly for the SSA portable contest, where I can use a tree-supported full size dipole and I know that many Scandinavian stations are active.
When the original PA broke, I decided to build a new MOSFET-based one. Initially I used a power MOSFET with way too high gate capacitance, but have since modified it. It now uses two parallel 2N7000 operating in class C, delivering about 3W of output with 12.7V in (2W at 10V, 1W at 7V). The transistors get a bit hot at 3W out, so the practical limit is about 2W. The receive current is about 110 mA, and key-down current about 530 mA (both measure at 10V in). Keying/key shaping is performed using the circuit from the GQRP Sudden transmitter, with a BD136 delivering current to the PA on key down.
The VFO board is mounted upside dowm in a shielded compartment at the bottom. I need to add some wax to it, so that it does not change its frequency when moved around. The tuning range is close to 100 kHz.
