Should contest rules allow and act upon 599K QRM reports?

Saturday 20 December 2014

President Lincoln II V3 review final comment on broken CW mode

My previous reviews have been answered by cbradiomagazine saying that it is perhaps unreasonable to expect a cb to perform well on cw and most users of this radio will not require this mode. I currently have access to 2 other cb radios with CW mode: Alinco DR-135UK Realistic HTX-100 These radios exhibit none of the faults described for the president Lincoln II V3. Basically you buy a President Lincoln II V3 at top dollar with the engineers at the company knowing full well that the radio is flawed in at least 4 ways (described in previous posts). The company must recon CB users won't notice these flaws and apparently aren't going to to bother fixing them as no pressure is being applied. Cbradiomagazine is happy with this result but I am not. I am now happy with my Alinco DR-135UK which is the right size and price for the car and will work for the occasional CW contact as well. A real pity I had to spend 2.5x on a PLIIV3 before I got here. If you are an SSB operator only (using the president Lincoln II V3), pay particular attention to TX drift (for the first second of transmission) when using the clarifier (not centred) as this isn't a CW only fault. Also time to PTT is very slow compared to other rigs so expect initial syllables to be cut. Also a quick stab at the mic button will result in a long transmission. All are devastating for CW, but might be annoying for SSB once you notice them. I suspect most of these problems are due to overloading an underpowered hardware architecture with pointless bells and whistles. For all potential buyers out there, I would not recommend the President Lincoln II V3. It is currently half a radio with many many problems under the hood (see previous reviews). I would however recommend the Alinco or better still the Realistic.

No comments: