I was not happy with the power levels from the RF gain stages. So last night I started slowly tweaking them until I decided to remove them and come up with another plan.

It will not likely put out this kind of power
at these levels... but it is a learning tool to figure out what is going on.

For tonight (time permitting after the family responsibilities) I think that I am
going to build a simple test fixture and use my signal generator to drive it with
a 0 dBm source. I did some modeling of the NPN at different bias levels. In my original
testing I was noticing some clipping of the sine wave on the oscope which looks like
I was running out of current on the negative peak. I would like to drive more gain
in the class A stage and maintain a healthy sine wave in this early stage.

I am hopping that I can use the test fixture to try to drive the NPN much harder and
get some gain out of this part. (Granted that the PN2222 is not a spectacular component
but I am well within it's rated power levels.) Originally I was trying to be too safe
and the result was low power levels. I will try to spank it a bit to see what happens.
(The PN2222 are cheap parts so I can afford to let the smoke out of a couple of them
if needed.)