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

Friday 3 November 2017

President Lincoln II+ Review

After all the bugs I found on the President Lincoln II for cw operation (see this blog), I was eager to try the II+ to see if President had bothered correcting any of them. Nevada had a flash sale and I decided to pick one up. I shall get straight to the point here.... 0 cw changes...I repeat 0 cw changes. What a massive disappointment. Long DAH problem when initial sent cw element is meant to be a DIT - still there Need to use RIT or split to equalise TX/RX frequencies to make any cw contacts - still the case Initial sent cw DAH frequency change due to RIT being off centre - still there Still the crap double sideband receiver mess - still the case And a new one....when you press and hold the up or down scan button on the microphone, you only hear the frequency you started the scan on. The only way to hear each frequency is to continuously tap either button leaving enough time for the audio to recover between each press. The radio sounds awful, I'm never finished fiddling with the RIT, something in the receiver chain blows big time...voices sound weak and dual tone like a dalek (I'm being kind here). I really cannot express my disappointment in this radio enough. It's not even that I bought an early version (both v3) or a Friday pup, I have two of them and both sound crap. I cannot believe anyone out there who owns an original Lincoln could like this radio. RF engineers at President should hang their heads in shame. Your peers really have showed you a clean pair of heels, the young apprentice has tried to take SMT short cuts and been distracted by DSP trickery and the result is a radio only the newbies could want to like (due to the cost). Any company who has been given free testing resource, free feedback and ignores it all and adds insult to injury by producing an update and calling it "+" as if it is an improvement, then just knocking out the same old crap deserves to go bust. I really do not like President Lincoln II (v3) or President Lincoln II+. I am embarrassed to have recently contributed to their coffers..twice!

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