So after much rooting around, I have this finally working and making ham radio noises. Its not brilliant, but it will do the job for now.

More things being tested for the hand held project. These are 1A power inductors. I need something much more low profile than a toroid to use in the low pass filter and also something not through hole. So i grabbed these power inductors to test to see how much loss they are going to induce. Turns out they are not all that bad and at least as good or better than the hand wound toriods i used on another board.

Other than the corner frequency being in the wrong place because i used the wrong cap values, the loss is less than 2db and that will be good enough for the kinds of girls I go out with. Oh and the hand wound type 2 iron cores? 3db loss. Go figure.