AmateurRadio.com

Without much (if any) advertising the Google+ ‘Chinese Ham Radio Equipment‘ community reached a 1000 members today. I intentionally made the community public, so there’s no need for a Google account in order to read there.

The downside of a community becoming larger is spam. Some of it is captured by Google itself and kept in a moderation queue, but some of it slips through and has to be deleted by the moderators. Because the moderators live in different time zones, spam never lives long.

What I still miss a bit there is the interactive part. If the community would be just another URL with the same content, it’s basically pointless. Questions about Chinese ham radio? Ask there, there’s a lot of knowledge and experience there.

Also nice: a carton box.

The carton box didn’t waste much time to cover the distance between the USA and Europe, but took almost the same amount of time to travel from Amsterdam Schiphol airport to my QTH — a one hour drive under the most challenging traffic conditions. Customs took their time…

As Brick also mentioned in in his last post about Anytone Tech: the reactions on the new models vary wildly. I think Brick said all there is to say, but I’ll add this thought:

– If a radio is cheap but crap, we complain, but buy it anyway.
– If a radio is good but costs more, we complain, but suddenly the price is all that matters.

Let’s see how these radios perform and at what price point before judging them. I know John of Miklor.com gets (or already has) review samples, and I’m on the list too. To give you some more insight in what these radios can and cannot do, here are some preliminary user manuals (PDF).

ANILE-8R User Manual (Preliminary)

NSTIG-8R User Manual (Preliminary)

OBLTR-8R + TERMN-8R User Manual (Preliminary)