The LARCSet is a 40m 5W SSB Transceiver Kit from hfsignals.com. It's just US$39. The VFO is analog and it's a descendant of the bitx40 line. Ashar Farhan says you can build it in a day and I can cornfirm that promise.
The board comes with the vast majority of components already fitted.
The work that needs to be done by the builder is winding a few toroids (although happly the three trifilar ones come pre-wound), assembling the front panel, fitting potentiometers, soldering crystals and a few transistors including the IRF510. The manual is very clear.
The front panel is held in place by the little screw nuts from the 3.5mm panel mount sockets and I found that there wasn't enough thread on these to hold it in place. I sanded down the front edge of the board and ended up gluing the nuts to better hold it in place.
My VFO toroid needed one extra turn to get it in the right range so bear that in mind when winding.
The varactor tuning is quite sensitive and I think a multi-turn pot or an additional fine tuning pot might be good idea. I like the idea of a totally analog VFO but amusingly QRP-Labs has just announced a compact digital VFO that could be suitable for radios like this. Here's a video showing unboxing, stages of the build, receiver testing and final completion.
I enjoyed the build and it worked first go. Because of the low cost of the kit, shipping is a significant part. HFSignals is offering a pack of five and I'm going to suggest it as a group build project at my local club.
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