Have you heard of zBITX?

 Well, I had not heard till I read the program schedule of LARC-7 today. Most of you would be familiar with uBITX which has gone up to version 6. Some of you would be aware of sBITX, which is quite an advance over uBITX. Almost daily I am meeting a new uBITX user on the band, most of them using additional linear amplifiers. That made me join the BITX group on groups.io, where I am getting messages from uBITX and sBITX users from all sides of the globe. Still I was not aware of zBITX and that made me look around and came across two references. One was the video of a talk by VU2ESE at QRP ARCI. Another was an email in the BITX groups.io which was citing the former. zBITX is a new transceiver from VU2ESE based on Raspberry Pi Zero for 20W, having CW skimmer and FT8 modes in addition to the regular SSB mode and waterfall display which the sBITX also has.


zBITX is quite small, just 3" x 3" x 1.5" in size. It is a Raspberry Pi Zero based 20 W software defined radio which has SSB, CW, FT8 and all FlDigi modes on the radio. In addition it has a CW decoder as mentioned earlier, N1MM style logger and editable CW macros. An html-based browser in the radio can be accessed by a cell phone over WiFi to control the radio. It does not need internet and works well at a remote portable operation location with no network coverage. All these look quite exciting and more than that it costs only $100 if you are going to build it yourself. I know that there are quite a few Raspberry Pi enthusiasts among youngsters. I do hope that many of them will take up amateur radio as their hobby and start building zBITX which is quite affordable if you build it on your own.

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