After all that work on Mountaineer, I recently found someone who was working on a similar project: Digirig Mobile by Denis Grisak K0TX. It’s pretty much identical in feature set, a quarter of the size, is similarly open source and was designed by an actual electrical engineer who knows what he is doing. After building cables to interface with the TX-500, it’s working perfectly!

QRP station with Digirig Mobile in grass

QRP station with Digirig Mobile at a picnic table

I spoke with Denis over email and he gave me some ideas to improve Mountaineer. I’m grateful, but for now, I think I’m just going to stop development on Mountaineer and guide people towards Digirig.

In a way, I’m a little relieved. It was a lot of fun developing Mountaineer and building my hardware skills, but the thought of productionizing it, mass-producing, having to deal with logistics and payments and customer service… It’s all more than I really wanted to pursue. I’ll leave that to someone with a more entrepreneurial spirit!