I purchased a Xiegu X108G HF Transceiver at the Dalton Hamfest from an estate seller. The radio appeared to be lightly used and in it’s original foam shipping container. I connected it to my LiPo battery and my dipole HF antenna to check reception. This video shows WWV on 10, 15 and 20 Mhz. All three frequencies were coming in to my location nicely on this Sunday morning.
My goal is to build this into a small kit with a battery and end fed antenna that I can keep in my car for when the POTA bug strikes me on road trips.
First impressions:
Sounded fairly good when warmed up. On first power up, I was picking up RFI bleeding in at 15 Mhz from a local broadcaster, whose transmitter is 6 miles away as the crown flies on 680 Mhz. That seemed to fade out as I switched around between the bands. I also toggled the preamp on and off, so I can’t isolate what the culprit is.
The best control of the radio seems to be from the Icom like microphone. I could switch bands, directly enter frequencies and try different modes like AM vs USB. I wasn’t impressed that USB was set to a 2.3 Mhz bandwidth by default, I prefer 2.7 so this was a little narrow.
The power on screen listed firmware from 2017 so I will be looking for options to upgrade that. It did not remember the frequency I was on when I turned it off and on, instead defaulting to 14.270 Mhz and LSB.