The MiniHF
Five bands, fifty watts, and no knobs.
The MiniHF is a five band HF radio that runs 50 watts PEP and has no front panel. No knobs, no tiny LCD to squint at. You plug it into a computer over USB, or you talk to it from your phone and leave the cable at home.
That sounds like a downgrade right up until you try it. The screen already in your pocket is bigger and sharper than anything I could bolt onto a box this size, and it costs me nothing to put it there, so the money goes into the RF instead of into a display and a pile of encoders.
Everything is I/Q, on receive and on transmit. SSB, CW, AM, FM and the digital modes all work, and the mode itself is a plugin. That API is open. If you want to run something the radio has never heard of, you can write it and you do not need my permission or my help to do it.
Power is 50 watts PEP on SSB, and it will hold a full 50 watts on FT8 without getting unhappy about it. There is an SWR meter built in, and if you present it with a bad match it backs the power off instead of destroying itself.
The base radio is meant to be cheap. Everything past that is a module: a separate box that hooks up with a JST-PH cable and a BNC jumper. No soldering, no surgery, and no buying a whole new radio because you wanted one more band.
| RF | |
|---|---|
| Bands | 80m, 40m, 20m, 17m, 15m (band limited, transmit and receive) |
| Output power | 50 W PEP, full duty on FT8 |
| Modes | SSB, CW, AM, FM, digital. I/Q on RX and TX |
| Antenna | BNC |
| Protection | Built in SWR meter with power foldback |
| Supply | 11 to 15 V DC |
| Enclosure | 3D printed |
| Control | |
| Front panel | None. One button and five RGB LEDs for setup |
| Wired | USB to a computer |
| Wireless | Bluetooth (Android), your wifi network, or its own access point |
| Software | |
| Desktop app | Mine, and open source |
| Phone app | Android and iOS. iOS is wifi or access point only |
| Plugins | Open API for new modes and features |
| Ordering | |
| Price | Not announced. Aiming budget for the base unit |
| Availability | Not announced |
Getting connected
Bluetooth works on Android. Apple will not let me have USB or Bluetooth on iOS, so iPhones connect over wifi instead, either through your home network or straight to the access point the radio can host when there is no network to join. Switching between those is done with the button and the LEDs, which also tell you which mode you are currently in. That part is still being worked out and it may well end up different.
Planned modules
None of these are built yet. They are what the base radio is being designed to accept.
- Power amplifier - takes the output up to 500 W
- Antenna tuner
- Filtering - first class dynamic range and much better filtering than the base radio has
- All band - adds every HF band
- GPS
What is open and what is not
| Open | Control software, plugin system, bare module schematic, module firmware API |
|---|---|
| Closed | Radio hardware, radio firmware, module firmware |
The point of publishing the module schematic and the firmware API is so you can build your own modules and have them work properly with the radio, without waiting on me to get around to it.
Where this actually is
None of it exists yet. I am still laying out the PCB, which is why there are no dimensions, no photos and no price on this page. Things are going to change while I build it. There is no waitlist and I am not taking money for a radio I have not finished. When there is something real to show, it shows up here and on the forum.
