Many thanks to Don (W7SSB) who shares the following two product images/teasers courtesy of Xiegu (click images to enlarge):
Thanks for sharing these, Don, as a follow-up to our previous post.
Xiegu fans will be happy to see that this new transceiver has a removable battery pack. If this pack is easy to source/obtain, that will indeed be a strong point.
It looks like Xiegu has also added fixed rails to protect the front panel along with reinforcement around the chassis.
It looks quite durable, although it also appears there are two knobs protruding on the top of the radio–?
On our previous post, there were a number of skeptical comments about the new Xiegu transceiver. Indeed, some of the comments were from X6100 owners who feel that Xiegu hasn’t fully completed all of the published features promised in the ‘6100 (which was released two years ago). A number of owners also commented that getting support or repair work done after the one year warranty has challenging. These are, for sure, some of the risks associated with price-competitive radios. Xiegu radios offer a lot of features for the price.
After this radio new is released, I will reach out to Xiegu or Radioddity and ask for a loaner to test in the field. I’ll be very interested to know if it has a few of these improvements over previous models:
- Better front end with some built-in BCI filtering
- Cleaner audio with balanced AGC
- Lower noise floor
- Longer battery life than the X6100
- Published features which actually work in the first production run
I haven’t gotten a confirmation of the price or availability yet.
Stay tuned!