At 9/13/2007 04:10 PM, you wrote: >QST wrote a 224 MHz radio review a few years back and I had been >meaning to save it. Three or four of the available 224 MHz radios >were covered. Alinco, ADI, Kenwood, Icom and someone else... at >least. > >Alinco Radios have a pretty good reputation and my ham friend likes >to beat the snot out of his gear... yet it keeps on playing like >the day it was built. Of the two Alinco Radios that I know were >returned for service... both were fixed right the first time and >returned in a semi normal amount of time.
The older Alinco radios have a good reputation. The currently production models are essentially junk. I bought a brand new DR-435T a couple of years ago & ended up returning it because the front end RF amp in all DR-435Ts oscillates. So you don't believe me? Try this: unplug the antenna, open the squelch & start tuning across the 440-450 MHz band. I guarantee you'll find a 30-40 kHz segment where the S-meter indicates a significant noise signal - probably full scale on the S-meter. Now put your hand against the side (I don't remember which side) and/or just underneath the radio. What'dya know, the noise went away! Not really, it just moved another 30 to 60 kHz away. Go ahead & plug the antenna back in; it'll still oscillate. The noise is strong enough to take out otherwise full quieting signals. The radio I exchanged with the repair center had the same problem, only at a different frequency. The frequency of oscillation also varies greatly with temperature, so when the radio was at just the right temperature it stopped receiving the local repeater. I also tried the above test on the DR-435T on display at Dayton this year, thinking surely they must have fixed the problem by now. No!!! I don't know if the 2 meter or 220 MHz versions have this problem. Probably not, but I'll bet the CTCSS decoder takes anywhere from 1 to 3 seconds to decay. Not acceptable behavior for a CTCSS'd link IMO. My all-time favorite for 220 repeating & linking is the venerable Midland 13-509. No IMD, no failures of any kind. Period. Recently I've found the ARRL product reviews to be lacking in meaningful content. The authors seem to be a lot more interested in audio quality & bells & whistles rather than actual performance. The 2-tone 3rd order IMD numbers they publish often vary greatly from what I measure, which of course seem far more reasonable (example: for the Alinco DJ-G5T ARRL labs claims a 2-tone dynamic range of 90 dB @ 10 MHz tone spacing! Now the G5 is a great radio - I own 2 of them - but 90 dB SPDR just isn't happening with this radio). Bob NO6B
