So after about a decade of operating, the Ten Tec which still works just fine I decided it was time for another radio. I put my old Alinco on the eBay market, with no complaints except that it was too much radio for me. This is a Xeigu G106 and it is a mowed all banned low power radio. After a decade of being a dedicated QRP station on 40 m I decided I wanted to try and test out what was available 10 years after my initial investment in SDR radios. It’s really amazing what they’ve packed into this thing and there are plenty of people on YouTube and other places who will tell you, it’s cheap garbage, however, like a lot of radio operators I think they tend to be the same people that need to have all the bells and whistles and have never given any serious thought to trimming their stations into efficiency. This tiny radio unit does 160 through 10 m Morris code, upper lower side, it has digital channels built-in upper and lower digital mode for filtering. It has a dedicated digital jack. It has a built-in key. It has a full display with an meter and a spectrum graph to help tune in by. You can’t change the volume of the side tone, which is a little weird, but you can change the tone of the side tone. it has three tiered filtering for Morse code, which is where I live. They didn’t put a jack on the chassis. You have to plug it in through the handy mic that is included it uses a RJ9 type adapter on the face for that microphone, which is the very small four wire connector that a telephone handset connects to the base with, I’ll just make up an adapter jack. I’ve made a couple of contacts on. It had great signal reports and think that if you’re getting into the hobby and are willing to deal with what comes as the baggage of operating a low power station for $230 you could do a lot worse. The receipt could be a little more selective, again it’s a budget friendly radio and for the record I made the contacts using Morse code on 40 m with a 40 m zip antenna so a simple wire antenna at about 25 feet above ground level putting out no more than 5 W.
