Hi Stephan! Thank you for your replay! I am always very wary and critical even of my own acquisitions. And I honestly tried to find serious flaws in the TX-500. But I did not find them for 3 months of ownership. Of course, there is something to improve, because there is no perfect equipment. But in general, the transceiver is very worthy and in its field of application (SOTA, hiking and mountain tourism, and much more), it occupies, in my opinion, a leading position today. In addition, I think that this transceiver is a completely unique concept of a hiking radio. It cannot be fully compared with transceivers of this class. The TX-500 is something new and unique in hiking radio.
I posed this question to my friend who has had his TX500 for just over 2 weeks now. He has not yet used it on any SOTA activations, but he has operated outdoors in parks as well as at home in the shack. He will be the first to admit that he is a very slow CW operator (who is practicing to get faster).
With that background, his response was “On the clicking, if you are a high speed full break-in operator it could be an issue. A couple of things, however. It’s not that annoying, well at least to me anyway. If you are slow like me, you just adjust the time to a longer gap so it doesn’t switch. And finally, if you are wearing earphones, you don’t hear it.”
You probably have a point about water, but I can tell you that during Field Day I managed to pull my KX2 off the table and have it land face down in the sand. I picked it up, blew it off and continued operating. Later I pulled it apart and found no sand inside.
Extensively reviewed in the August QST mag. External battery, external tuner. Built like a battleship, with effective water resistance. As to the annoying relay clicks on CW, they recommend changing the break-in delay to 500 milliseconds or using headphones. Problem gone.
Let me share the first impressions I got from this rig.
I only did a few QSOs from home with a compromised antenna and only did two activations with the TX-500 yet, so it’s too early for a comprehensive review, but let me elaborate about my personal experiences so far I had, by doing only SSB.
I received this transceiver nearly two weeks ago (the first EU batch), but realized after some tests that it doesn’t TX on the 60-meter band. Bummer!
So I wrote Lab599 about this finding. After some email exchanges, they swiftly created a hot-fix firmware supporting the 60-meter band for this EU batch. Why am I always the one who finds the bugs first, but of course only with other’s people software …
The main points:
Very robust, (probably) water resistant and light (compared to the FT-817/818). Unfortunately, I could not test it yet in heavy rain. Yesterday, when I was activating in the Vosges, I mostly saw dark clouds, but never got really wet. The first activation where I hoped for rain, hi.
Low current consumption in RX-mode, so it does not get warm in the shadow. But it can get pretty hot when transmitting with the full 10W output power and exposed to the sun. Therefore, I don’t know if it’s a good idea to pack the LiIon batteries to the rear heat dissipation surface, even with some air gap. Let’s see how they will tackle this challenge.
I used an external 2Ah 4S LiFePo4 (about 25Wh, see image below) that weights about 200g for both activations, including my stress-tests. At the end, the battery was completely drained and its low-voltage protection circuit switched it off.
I tested the temperature limits of this transceiver under the sometimes strong noon sun (at nearly 48 degrees North) with several minutes of TX in FM: it got very hot but didn’t stop transmitting. Quick cool-off after stopping TX and moving to the shade.
Easy and self-explanatory menu/settings system. Quick to tune around, etc. But beware of some settings, e.g. never set the notch filter to type 2 (high-performance filtering mode, provides lower signal processing latency) or you will have a hard time to understand your QSO partners (e.g. the 60m QSO with @DD5LP).
After disabling the notch filter, or setting it back to type 1 (standard mode, provides high quality filtration), all sounded fine again.
A lot of settings to tweak with, like the mic gain, the compression, RX and TX audio equalizer and the RX and TX filter settings. I still have to find the optimal values.
Thanks goes to @HB9CYV for sending me two videos with my voice on the 60-meter band! Chris preferred the FT-818 sound (no dynamic compressor, but slightly modified ALC; I bought it new like that) due to more bass and more natural sound, but I personally like the punchy sound of the TX-500.
To me the RX-audio is adequate when using the standard speaker-microphone. I would prefer a bit more bass, but it’s fine for SSB-voice, even music sounds OK.
I didn’t hear any hiss noise, as @SP2RM was concerned about.
Next time, I’ll try it with a headset.
The measured SWR that is shown on the display seems very optimistic when using my resonant EFHW. I didn’t carry my antenna analyzer with me, but I had the feeling that the values were too good to be true (showing between 1.0 and 1.3 on the resonant bands).
Since I don’t have SWR anxiety, I even transmitted with a terrible SWR of about 10 with F/PA3FYG/P (@PA3FYG) on the 17-meter band (I intentionally set it non-resonant for this band), who was on a nearby summit. The power output on the display was looking pretty low and I fully trusted the protection circuit of the final stage. We both exchanged 5/9, but honestly, we were only separated by about 20km distance.
What I don’t like is the glare display. For outdoors, I prefer a matte screen. The display has good contrast and is well readable under direct sun, but one has sometimes to change the angle to not get blinded by the bright sun light.
The following picture shows this effect:
Your TX audio sounded quite clean and clear when I worked you on 40m yesterday. I couldn’t notice any compression artifacts at all, and remember thinking to myself at the time that the audio had a nice sound and very readable with the QSB (55 and down).
I faced I few videos which show clicks after setting PRE on, and RFG to 0+ and than increasing Audio Gain to 20+. There is significant distortion in ouput audio like overloading audio frequency amplifier.
Interesting, I had the pre-amplifier enabled and the rf-gain set to 0 (default setting) but didn’t hear distortions. Do you have a link of such video that shows this behavior?
In the first video, one hears a lot of man-made RF noise, and after Vlad connects the line output to an external (active) speaker, suddenly a French voice can be heard. But I’m not sure what was the problem that Vlad wanted to show. IMHO, a signal generator would be better and more repeatable to analyze a problematic RX behavior.
In the second video, I focused on the SSB part, but even after listening and looking at the transceiver’s display (for changing AGC, AF- and RF-gain values), I’m not sure if I really understood the problem.
Using the translator, it seems that there is a problem with AGC and therefore overloading the AF-stage. Further, it seems that part of it can be solved by increasing the RF-gain, but this sound not logic to me and I’m not sure if I understood it correctly. Unfortunately, due to the not perfect English translation (that is moreover not my mother tongue), I may have missed the fine details.
I really appreciate that RX3ALL sent his findings to the developers, so we may hope for an improvement in this weak spot.
I can only compare the TX-500 with my FT-818 in the field. At home, using my IC-7300 is useless, due to high level of man-made noise.
As of now, I’m very happy with the reception performance of this transceiver, also thanks to the diverse filter setting possibilities. But I’ll have to further tweak and play with it in the field. Time and future firmware updates will tell.
Here is video, where RX3ALL connects RF Generator to Xiegu G90 and TX-500.
As a result sensitivity of TX-500 meets the specs but at some time there are noticeable distortion during receiving signal from generator at 3:50m.
Also Vlad posted video for TX-500 where he set equalizer to 5 or 10 for SSB and this solved annoying noise (clicks). You cat try to do this (increase EQL RX HF to 100) on your rig and enable PRE and RFG to 5, I am very curious about results.
I’m diving to this due to fact that I recently sold my Xiegu G90 due annoying hiss noise. I was not able to work with G90 more than 15 minutes without break using headphones. Here is comparision of audio noise with my home brew superhet trx (please, use headphones or increase volume):
That is why I would like to make sure that TX-500 does not have similar problems like G90.
I can’t say much about the first video, since I have no experience with CW. The filter is set to 50Hz, which is very narrow.
In the second video: at which time can the problematic behavior heard?
About comparing your home-brew radio with the G90 in the third video: I could not hear hiss with the G90, but maybe I misunderstand/misinterpret this term.
The G90 definitely lacks some bass but has more treble than your home-brew rig that lacks the higher frequencies. It sounds to muffled to me, but this is very personal.
I have no idea about the filter settings in both radios, but the slope of the flanks (I hope this is the correct English term) will be anyways very different for both radios. To have a fair comparison of the sound, both TRXs should at least use the same speaker.
The audio level was set higher on the G90 than the SW2017 and we are talking different loud speaker sizes as well I believe. Again, it’s not clear what is thought to be the problem but I have no such problem with my G90 - perhaps because I normally operate with headphones?
I remember my old FT817ND was difficult to listen to at high volume levels until I changed the speaker from the original Yaesu one to one that was the same impedance and size but that was with a plastic (Mylar?) radiator rather than a cardboard/paper one. The replacement was actually built for model railway systems.
In any case the G90 and FT817 are getting off topic here from the TX500’s (apparent) problems. As always what is a problem for one operator might not be so for a different person.
To finally close off topic, on 0:35 on my G90 video I hear strong hiss noise despite the fact that it was spring near the lake without any man-made or atmosphere static noise. The audio gain was not important because using headphones or line-in for recording produce the similar result with hiss noise only from G90
I also constantly use high-impedance headphone and It was hard to use it with G90 after QCX or 2017 or FT-891.
Unfortunately, I sold G90 and was not able to record using audio input like here in video:
But anyway, I agree with you about
what is a problem for one operator might not be so for a different person
I just put my Sennheiser headphones on and listened carefully once more: the recording sounds very good to me and as you said it seems Spring with all the birds singing. But I still can’t hear any hiss at this 0:35 position, to me it’s simply loud noise, just before the AGC kicks in.
And as Ed @DD5LP already said, these things are very subjective.
Hi all, I don’t have any experience of any of these radios, but I’ve been following this discussion with interest
It seems fairly clear to me that you are actually both talking about the same thing . Even without possible language differences and so on, “hiss” and “noise” are much the same thing, from my perspective…
As I say, I’m not familiar with these radios, but it sounds to me like the G90 has much higher RF gain, combined with fast AGC - if it has a RF gain control, winding it back would drastically reduce the burst of noise/hiss. Actually, I think i read something along these lines on a review on eHam.net. Possibly a firmware update was needed to give this control though. I know this is off topic, but but couldn’t resist adding my opinion. Sorry!
I’d also like to say that I’m very impressed with your homebrew transceiver, Yury. Very professional looking!
73
Steven
Sometimes you don’t know where the hiss/noise is coming from, but if it is an SSB receiver, the filter will have cut off signals from the signal frequency that are more than say, 3 khz. So if your headphones have high frequency hiss, it’s just as likely to be from the AF stage as the IF. And not coming from the signals hitting the antenna at all. I had this problem with an IC701 I used some time ago, with Sennheiser headphones that were very wide range. At that time I was young enough to hear at least to 15 khz (tvs drove me mad). And the audio stage in the 701 made enough noise at high audio frequencies to make those headphones quite uncomfortable for long periods of use.
A filter at audio frequencies sorts that out of course, but you shouldn’t need to go to such lengths. I wonder if anyone has tried that with the tx500.
…
. Even without possible language differences and so on, “hiss” and “noise” are much the same thing, from my perspective…