Since I own a amateur radio license, I carefully watch auctions on ebay on that topic. Usually I am very excited about portable transceivers. This way, I could already equip some friends to enter the ham world.
The last 18 months, the number of auctions listed got much bigger. Endless listings of items, originating from china appeared, prominent names being Wouxun, Puxing, Linton, NKT, JMT, Weierwel. For many of these items, descriptions and other information was very hard to find on the internet, if there was any. The price of these new items and accessories was – including handling and shipping from china – much less than those for used transceivers of well known manufacturers here.
My own first appearance in the VHF/UHF world was made using a modified C5 – an old portable mobile phone by Siemens, which gave me 15W on 70cm. This item – modified and many years old – back them would cost me much more than the current price of new chinese handheld transceivers – which are in fact much more portable and feature rich. A delightful shot on ebay later gave me a Kenwood TH-F7E, a well known portable dual band (2m/70cm) transceiver.
Some months ago, I thought about these chinese devices again and was thinking: “Its about time ti try those”. I searched the net and some portals about the Wouxun KG-UV2D, a dual-band transceiver that was available locally already. I also talked about this device to some OMs nearby. This device was just released to the market and the successor of the KG-UV1D, which some of these people I talked to owned. The retail price in the shops was about 110 Euro, 95 Euro on ebay. The fact that this transceiver should be much cheaper than my fellow companion by Kenwood rankled me somehow and I wondered if there would be a hitch.
The OMs I talked to differed about the device. Some said, there was potential in these devices and there were quite usable, some said, these devices were of very inferior quality. Some reasons many had in common were crappy modulation, instable frequencies, wrong information about the technical data by the manufacturer and out of band (and out of regulation) side transmissions. The latter I could neither verify nor disprove, because I lack the equiptment. To all the others I want to state my opinion in the next weeks.
After some QSOs with some people, who were working with the KG-UV2D (or the earlier KG-UVD1) I noticed that modulation and signal sounded both just fine. I could not receive any distorsion on the neighbouring channels either. I figured it would not hurt to try some of the devices at least, offered on ebay and test them properly. For that I decided to define a budget, equal to the price I paid for the used Kenwood-HT (which was about 150 Euros). That should – if possible – leave me with at least 3 handheld transceivers to test.
I decided for the following three devices, with either already have arrived or are on their way from china:
My own first appearance in the VHF/UHF world was made using a modified C5 – an old portable mobile phone by Siemens, which gave me 15W on 70cm. This item – modified and many years old – back them would cost me much more than the current price of new chinese handheld transceivers – which are in fact much more portable and feature rich. A delightful shot on ebay later gave me a Kenwood TH-F7E, a well known portable dual band (2m/70cm) transceiver.
Some months ago, I thought about these chinese devices again and was thinking: “Its about time ti try those”. I searched the net and some portals about the Wouxun KG-UV2D, a dual-band transceiver that was available locally already. I also talked about this device to some OMs nearby. This device was just released to the market and the successor of the KG-UV1D, which some of these people I talked to owned. The retail price in the shops was about 110 Euro, 95 Euro on ebay. The fact that this transceiver should be much cheaper than my fellow companion by Kenwood rankled me somehow and I wondered if there would be a hitch.
The OMs I talked to differed about the device. Some said, there was potential in these devices and there were quite usable, some said, these devices were of very inferior quality. Some reasons many had in common were crappy modulation, instable frequencies, wrong information about the technical data by the manufacturer and out of band (and out of regulation) side transmissions. The latter I could neither verify nor disprove, because I lack the equiptment. To all the others I want to state my opinion in the next weeks.
After some QSOs with some people, who were working with the KG-UV2D (or the earlier KG-UVD1) I noticed that modulation and signal sounded both just fine. I could not receive any distorsion on the neighbouring channels either. I figured it would not hurt to try some of the devices at least, offered on ebay and test them properly. For that I decided to define a budget, equal to the price I paid for the used Kenwood-HT (which was about 150 Euros). That should – if possible – leave me with at least 3 handheld transceivers to test.
I decided for the following three devices, with either already have arrived or are on their way from china:
- UHF/VHF fully featured Transceiver: Wouxun KG-UV2D for 80€
- VHF minimalistic Transceiver: Jin Ma Tong JMT-228 for 45€ (no info from the manufacturer – Unboxing and Test by G4ILO)
- UHF minimalistic Transceiver: NKT NKT-R3 for 25€ (Thanks to M0JMO via G4ILO)
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