I bought the G90 from Ham Radio Outlet in New Castle, DE about a month ago. Great price at around $430US.
This thing has almost a cult following. You've got a couple of Facebook groups, a dedicated Groups.io mailing list and even a Discord server dedicated to it. To say that it was a disrupter in the pretty lame Ham Radio HF market is not even close. Its a game changer. The closest radio in the price range is the very staid and old Icom IC-718. We're talking about almost 20 years of tech difference with the G90 being Software-Defined and the 718 being old school.
I bought the radio because my Ham friend in Florida thought it would be fun to each get one and figure them out together. Great, but he got so frustrated that he sold his at a loss and bought a used 718. The irony!
Being a techie I wasn't about to let the G90 best me. In fact, I find it pretty easy to use once you figure it out. And you do have to read the manual, Mandarin -> English interpretation goofs and all. In fact, you have to read the manual a dozen times before you get the full gist of it. There are more than a few questionable decisions as to where to hide features and functions.
The radio manages to put out only 20 watts. And that's fine if your doing CW or digital. For SSB you're at a real disadvantage except maybe on the upper bands like 12, 15 or 10. You'll have a heck of a time on 40 or 80 unless you're running it into a big beam up 50 feet. And if you have that kind of antenna, you're probably not using a 20 watt radio as your 'big gun'.
The ideas that Xiegu had for this radio are sound. Separating body and head for easy mobile mounting, full-featured handheld mic (sans backlighting alas), customizable knobs, etc. But the big drawbacks for me is the detented tuning knob, the miniature display and the tiny, TINY buttons. It's really too small for mobile fumbling and barely big enough for the desktop.
Additionally, to use the radio for digital, and this is a great radio for FT8, you need an audio/control adapter. I use the XGG Digimode 4. But the connections are not all available in the rear panel of the main body. You have to use both the side port on the head unit and the back mini-DIN. Not a great design if you separated the head from the body like I did.
One other thing is the cooling. While you won't have any issue on CW or SSB, on digital modes with longer duty cycles can really heat the thing up. To save money, Xiegu decided not to include a fan but to use the radio's aluminum body as the heat sink. It can get hot enough that a couple of aftermarket sources sell a hideous stand with a built-in thermostatically-controlled fan. Epic fail.
I don't have any gripes with the G90's performance. It's good. The audio is loud and clear, the tiny display is plenty bright and the capabilities are plentiful. It's just as a fat-fingered Ham, the smallness of everything has lead to more than one miss-press of a button or two with the ensuing hilarity while I scramble to undo whatever it was I did.
The radio stays. Selling it off won't make me happy, but it will most likely spend it's time on a handful of WARC FT8 frequencies while I happily tune around the bands on my Icom IC-7300.
Comments
Post a Comment