Xiegu G90: A Worthwhile Entry Into HF?
Xiegu’s G90 is a relative newcomer to the HF field and one I get a lot of questions about. I’ll state up front that I do not own one- and that’s not a repudiation of the radio but rather a recognition that I have enough HF gear to equip a region as is, and unless anyone is offering one for T&E, I’m not in the market for a new purchase. But that said a lot of other people are indeed asking about them and I’ve got a number of users over a the Brushbeater Forum who’ve had good results so far. At least for me, radio reviews are best when they’re done from an end-user perspective.
AB36, a well versed operator himself and a student of mine from out west, reported:
I have one, IMO it is a good rig especially for the price, awesome tuner, about 600mW draw at rest and full 20 watt output even at lower battery voltages. The radio seems robust, I had a power supply go bad and feed the radio with 25 volts for at least a few minutes, no magic smoke and no other issues from the over voltage. FL Rig supports most radio functions. I get good reports on voice and with the proper cabling the digital modes work well also.
It is not a one cable radio for digital modes, it requires at least a soundcard connected through a data interface of some sort and a CAT control connection. It is sensitive to RF and requires good grounding and clamp on ferrite rings on cables. The FW uploader is clunky and the radio will try to autoboot it if you leave the CAT cable plugged in while turning on radio and computer. The radio runs warm and needs a fan if TX steady on digital modes. I am not CW savy so I can’t comment on that mode. The onboard CW decoder seems to work ok on good signals. The screen is small but clear and the speaker sounds good to me. It can be modded to TX outside the ham bands. Others have said the RX is very good, but I have no other brand of radio so no direct experience. I bought another one to have a spare.
Definitely a feature-rich package for under $500.
Atlas Shrug, another student and someone’s opinion I trust, also chimed in:
“I’ve played around with it a fair bit. Of course I can only transmit on 10m, which is mostly dead right now, so the vast majority of my experience is receive only. I’ve used a hand me down 10m dipole, but more recently hung an 80m wire off a Balun Designs balun set up for EFHW usage. No digital now, no desire to do CW, so only phone mode usage for me.
The only other HF unit I have is a Yaesu FT-450D that I also got in February. I really like them both, but they are very different. As everyone notes, the tuner on the G90 is pretty much amazing. Also, I find the antenna analyzer to be pretty useful.
As a tool to explain radio to people, that little spectrum display is quite handy. You can illustrate a lot of concepts visually, which can really help. With the radio being portable friendly, this training aspect should not be overlooked.”
That last point is critical, especially for conveying an abstract concept such as finding signals on HF. Its already a pretty steep learning curve, so anything we can use to make it a bit more accessible is certainly welcome. And that of course underscores the need for training. Having a small, power efficient rig with everything on board is certainly worth having, even if all you’re concerned with is listening. Modifications are pretty straightforward as well, should you be so inclined, so I don’t see a reason not to pick up one or a couple if you’re in need.
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GUNS N GEAR
https://www.amazon.com/BTECH-Mini-UV-25X2-Mobile-Radio/dp/B06XD3CQ6H/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=btech+25&qid=1623156939&s=electronics&sr=1-3
i grabbed one of these off the AP site affiliate link, for possible mobile, vehicle applications after seeing one of the articles here on AP
the radio above looks great for the price thanks for the article.
Just ordered one from HRO based on your comments and the other people you cite in the article. Been looking for a QRP portable radio for a while. Thanks for the info.
I really don’t need another HF radio, but the newly introduced QR20 SDR radio from Raddioddity has me interested. It’s a 20 watt all mode HF/VHF/UHF radio in a small package with a nice display. They say that it will additionally have add-on modules coming to give it DMR, digital compass, and GPS capabilities.
The first run sold out very quickly. When they come back in stock I may have to order one.
Matt
I’ll have to check that out, especially for the VHF / UHF in SSB. There’s a LOT of capability there that’s criminally underutilized.
“. . . especially for the VHF / UHF in SSB . . .”
That’s one reason that I like the FT-817 as it has that capability, plus the original model’s ability to be freenbanded (not that I’d ever do that).
Matt
5
OH8STN
Xiegu G90 HF SDR Transceiver – Deep walkthrough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCsU14RKoyk
Xiegu G90 Digital Modes Setup
https://youtu.be/xRcHVFRUL4U
He’s a BLM supporter.
Good (actually, essential) to make bridges, but that’s a more difficult one to cross…
I operate on the strong hunch that many workaday people claiming to be BLM supporters wouldn’t be aware that, like all the socially divisive ‘movements’ we’ve seen, they’ve fallen prey to modern-day Operation Gladio operations connected to WEF/NWO/Intelligence agency filth.
Agreed. But at the same time, that doesn’t absolve one from the ramifications of such an association.
I’ve known Julian for several years; and know someone who served with him. All of our conversations have been of a technical nature and his expertise is invaluable. Politics is a subject that never comes up; however knowing his past history I can understand his ‘anti-racism’ stance.
So I assume the BLM supporter you mean is the post immediately above yours?
Chinese phone companies get banned because of spying, they buy off Biden admin… yes I get it now… let’s buy Chinese made radios… yeah sounds like the best idea yet… and it has a great receiver.
No wonder we are in the spot we are in.
Yawn.
Looks I hurt your feelings.
And you also apparently have no idea how HF works, much less a radio. Get gone.
If you can spare the cash or save up, consider products from Elecraft, American-designed and manufactured. Sadly it’s not always the case that the American product is better than Chinese, but in this case it is! The KX3 is in a comparable class to the Xiegu G90 and has better specs, though it is significanty more expensive. Here is an excellent radio test data table showing the KX3’s superiority to the G90 in almost every radio performance related spec (you’ll have to search for the entries, paste them into spreadsheet for easier comparison):
http://sherweng.com/table.html
One aspect where the G90 might be superior (I’m mostly making an educated guess based on a KX3 review I read a while ago and photographs, I don’t own either. I did pick up a Xiegu in NCScout’s class and it appeared physically well-made) is the durability of the chassis and control panel, but, if true, this can be remedied with a hard case. Even the Xiegu will still need a hard case if pressed into real field duty. It might be arguable that the G90 is a better value, but comparison then becomes more subjective.
I do own Chinese HTs and will continue to buy them, but still give preference to buying Elecraft, Icom, Yaesu, etc. FYI, I have no affiliation with any radio company.
I’m a huge fan of CommRadio’s CTX-10, also American designed and built.
My worry with any of the software defined radios (as you’re better aware overall than I am and have discussed before) is how much easier it becomes for such a radio to broadcast a unique identifier (surrpetitiously hardcoded into unit) or act as a unbeknownst location beacon. Though even a traditional analog radio would have a unique signature (reference oscillator frequency, spurious signal content, other?), some digitally encoded ID could make automated identification of radio traffic much easier. To the extent this concern is vaild, this might be a reason to use traditional designs like analog superheterodyne and have separate receive-only and transmit radios. If a radio was built (or later adopted) for paramilitary use, it might be wise to assume such a capability is inserted in the radio. Another helpful technique could be to modularize the radio, with digital and analog sections in separate units (swappable and with some well-defined interface between them).
Keep in mind the manufacturer wouldn’t necessarily have to cooperate. An SDR might have it’s firmware overwritten after physical interception of a shipment, with no one being the wiser. Depending on the radio architecture, It’s highly likely no hardware modification would be needed, just reprogramming of code. Physical interception and implant of exploits is a known technique used by NSA and presumably others.
Some of this risk is mitigated by the techniques NCScout teaches, like use of lowest RF power output needed and directional antennas.
Always weigh the benefit of a technology with its risk of being used against you. Choose the minimum level of technology/complexity to securely accomplish the job. None of us as individuals can fully understand the complexity of the human-built environment (let alone the natural), yet unaccountable organizations like NSA (and by extension FBI, DHS, etc.) have spent hundreds of billions of our dollars and employ tens of thousands so that an oligarchy can cut through that complexity and have ‘total information awareness’ and literally run an algorithmic model of our individual and collective behavior. (This is beyond what even Orwell envisioned!)
There’s definitely that possibility. DMR has that function, at least to a certain extent, based on radio model. This is grossly oversimplifying it, but you get the idea.
One bit of solace I can offer is that from the sheer volume of SDR radios out there (and a rapidly growing number on HF), any subaudible signature would become a moot point.
A coded identifier can be inserted below the noise floor of an RF signal and recovered by using a mathematical operation called correlation. This is how GPS receivers can pick out very weak satellite signals that are actually below the receiver noise floor (so even with a perfectly noiseless spectrum analyzer, you cannot necessarily ‘see’ the signal as it’s below the noise floor at the interface between the free space EM wave and the antenna). The idea is related to averaging a signal, in which random components will tend to cancel out while a repetitive feature will stand out. So the noise floor can be artificially lowered by either averaging over multiple transmissions or using correlation and having knowledge of what at least part of the hidden signal looks like.
This is meant just as an example of how much more tricky the insertion of information could be. It needn’t be like a sequence of subaudible tones superimposed on the transmission. It could be piggybacked on an RF signal and be invisible on a spectrum analyzer and in the demodulated baseband unless you knew exactly what to look for. Such an identifier could be periodically burst transmit, riding atop the normal signal.
This being said, if the adversary is the NSA, maybe any radio signal (that is intercepted over some period of time), without any modification to the radio needed, could be made uniquely identifiable when you have a supercomputer at your disposal. If anyone can better elaborate on the points above, please do, as I’m at the hairy edge of my knowledge here.