Amateur radio is a fantastic hobby for learning, connection, and adventure. Small and portable radios are perfect for learning HF radio, connecting with people, and outdoor radio adventures (POTA and SOTA).

Pebble HF is an ultra-affordable, ultra-portable HF radio kit for anyone to get into HF amateur radio.

Backstory

Pebble HF was born out of passion from HamRadioDuo, in collaboration with Barb WB2CBA, as a way to give back. The backbone of Pebble HF is from Barb WB2CBA's hardware design and an existing firmware design by Guido PE1NNZ. Thank you so much to both of them!

This project is a day dream that Mike, N4FFF, has had since before becoming a ham. He got started in amateur radio with the belief that a cheap kit radio called the PIXIE is all he needed. He never was able to make a single contact on the PIXIE, but it was its existence that allowed him to get started. The PIXIE's lack of filtering and tuning ended up being a problem he couldn't get past. Now we are on a mission to make sure that a great option exists for anyone needing to get started!

Mike was introduced to Barb WB2CBA by a viewer who was using his TinyDX QRPp radio for digital use. After a decade of actively looking for someone with the right experience, Barb's existing uSDX design was a perfect baseline. He modified the design to make it ultra-affordable by making it a single band and, importantly, making as much of the design as possible surface mount so that it can be ordered super low cost. It is a brilliant design for this purpose because the base open source project is a software defined radio making it possible to pack a ton into a tiny package with super low cost!

There are many fantastic QRP radios already (QMX and CFT1 are great examples). If you are already interested in one of those, please get one! Pebble HF was created for all of those people who need an ultra low cost option with minimal effort to build as a kit.

Pebble HF was created to get more people into the wonderful hobby, encourage people to upgrade their license to have fun with HF, or simply encourage more people to have fun with outdoor radio!