Yesterday I finished building a QRP Labs QMX 5 band transceiver. It wasn’t an easy build but after loading the firmware, it lit up and I heard the sweet sound of QRN in my earbuds. Yay!!

Well at the very same time I finished up that kit, I ran out of solder. I realized that I had been using that roll of solder for over 10 years…ever since I built my first rig, an OHR 100 40M QRP transceiver. There have been a lot of kits and a couple of thousand end fed antenna rigs as well as thousands of keys. 

Sorta weird, but that little roll of solder has been a fixture on my desktop for over a decade and I’m sad to see it empty, but on the other hand, I am grateful to know that its been there for me as I managed my way through the sometimes steep learning curve of being an enthusiastic builder and 100% CW op.

I’m 75 in a few days and I expect that the next roll will outlive me. With any luck perhaps my granddaughter or grandson will become hams and use it to create a new world of discovery in a spare bookcase tucked away in their future “computer room”, happy to be using my then vintage IC-7300, wondering how anyone could use such a primitive thing to communicate when their glasses could do the same thing.

Will there be such a thing as solder then?