Bill mentioned that 40 is best through the sunspot cycle, and he's probably right there.

A funny thing seems to happen, tho. When we buy a rig, we tend to be thinking the long term, especially when we are struggling to fit it into the budget. The reality is, within a year or two we will have another rig, maybe not all that much better but different. Probably the right thing to do is to think of a rig for now.

We have reached the peak of the sunspot cycle. From here on in it's downhill. But for the next year or two the spots will be up.

40 is an extremely annoying band. There is all sorts of QRM, and at this point in the cycle, practically unuseable in the daytime, certainly for QRP. Whenever the sun burps, it is absolutely unuseable, and that happens a lot at this point in the cycle. Come the summer, it will be miserable most of the time. Late at night, tho, it's not so bad, especially in the winter.

20, on the other hand, is open fairly well into the evening, and except for contest weekends, is relatively QRM free. It's also a much lower absorption band, so much more QRP friendly. As the summer approaches, it re-opens pretty quickly after it shuts down - by mid summer, it will shut down around 10 or 11, and open back up a half hour later to northern Europe. Wintertime, tho, it does go to sleep earlier and earlier. And as we move over the next 5 years, it will get earlier yet.

So if by "evenings" you mean 6-9, then 20 may be really good. If, however, you mean 10-2, then 40 is a better choice. If you are somewhere in the middle, and ragchews, rather than foxhunts and other events, are your thing, maybe you should consider 30, which sort of combines the best of both.

The K1 is a really nice rig - I just built one. The 20/40 combination gives you a lot of flexibility. It is a lot more expensive than the single band rigs, but a lot nicer, too.

The better single band rigs you can't get. IMO, the Ten Tec doesn't give you much for the money, but the Red Hot/Norcal (much better than the TenTec, IMO) isn't really available, and neither are the DSW rigs. The OHR looks like a nice rig but it seems like many people need to send them back to the factory to get them to work.

Sort of leaves the Ten Tec/MFJ (low end) or the K1 (high end). It's kind of easy to go an extra $30 for the DSW or an extra 50 for the Red Hot, but you can't get them. The K1 begs for the ATU and the noise blanker, and suddenly it's four times the price of the Ten Tec. Sort of hard to swallow, but it is an awfully nice radio.


Link:  My K1 pix