Receiver Review: Bearcat 210 XLT

Published at 12:59 on 18 September 2015

I bought one of these used for $10 at the Puyallup Hamfest last March, and it’s been a great addition to my lineup of receivers. I use it to monitor a couple local ham repeaters from the main living room so I won’t miss a call if I’m not in the radio room. For that purpose, it’s a steal of a deal at $10.

It is over 20 years old. Which means:

  • Don’t assume one you see for sale works. I looked at two at the Hamfest, plugging in and trying both. Good idea, as the one I passed on had some glitches.
  • No trunking; that technology was in its infancy a quarter-century ago.
  • No digital modes like P25. Same story as above.
  • “Only” 40 memory channels in 2 banks, not hundreds in dozens of banks.
  • No tone or digital squelch, carrier squelch only. Not a terribly big deal, as carrier squelch will still work in such situations.
  • “Wide band” FM only; it way predates the recent narrowbanding mandate. Not a big deal, just turn up the volume to compensate. Plus the ham repeaters I monitor still all use wide band.

It’s not all bad news, though. It has some nice features:

  • A simple user interface. It doesn’t have many features, and there’s basically a dedicated key or control for each one. I didn’t need to use a manual to figure out how to use it; it’s that self-explanatory.
  • A built-in power supply, a big plus if you leave it powered on for extended periods (as one tends to do with a scanner).
  • A nice bright vacuum-fluorescent display that’s easy to read in dim conditions.
  • Decent audio. I can easily hear it anywhere in the main part of the house.

It’s a scanner, not a general-purpose communications receiver. There’s no tuning knob or S-meter. It receives FM only in most of its range, and AM only in the air bands. Not a big deal for me, as I bought it to scan FM, and it works just fine for this purpose.

I even sometimes eavesdrop on the local police and fire services with it, because I’m in one of those areas that’s never adopted either trunking or digital technology for its public service communications.

All in all, if you can live with their limitations, those old scanners can, as mentioned earlier, be a steal of a deal.

Random Note: Comet SMA-503 on the Yaesu FT-60

Published at 14:52 on 5 June 2014

I recently and without planning was thrust into the market for an aftermarket antenna for my Yaesu FT-60 HT. The original one became unscrewed fell off on a hike last week. Gotta love those losing SMA connectors that merely screw on instead of clicking securely into place with a bayonet mechanism like the far superior BNC ones.

Anyhow, I needed a new antenna ASAP because starting tomorrow I’m going to be in the woods doing botanical surveys for a few days, and I don’t like to be alone away from cell coverage without some other possible means of communication. And since it was easier to source an aftermarket antenna promptly rather than an exact factory replacement, that’s what I did.

While the SMA connector mates fine electrically, the factory antenna had a little skirt below the connector that made a tight seal. The new antenna has no skirt, and so leaves a gap that is both unsightly and a way for dirt and moisture to enter. Comet even included a small rubber washer with the antenna for this purpose, but it is too small to fill the gap in my case.

The solution is an O-ring, in this case a #83 (1/2″ OD X 5/16″ ID X 3/32″ thick) O-ring. Figured I’d mention that here in case anyone fires up Google to search for a solution, and mention both the size number and the dimensions of the O-ring.

My experience indicates that about 49% of hardware stores sell O-rings only by size number and look at you like you’re a visitor from Mars if you give them dimensions, and 49% of hardware stores sell O-rings only by dimensions and look at you like you’re a visitor from Mars if you give them a size number. (I’m one of the lucky 2% these days; my local hardware store sells them by both specifications.) So be sure and take both specifications with you.

If you’re radio is something other than an FT-60, and you have a gap to fill, don’t rely on my information above. Each radio is slightly different. If the included rubber washer doesn’t do the trick, there is no substitute for having the radio with you so you can find exactly the best size.

D-STAR Myths

Published at 21:03 on 18 October 2013

Some time ago I wrote a post about D-STAR. It’s time to revisit the technology and do some quick summarizing.

D-STAR is an Open Standard

Maybe in an abstract theoretical sense, but in practice, it’s proprietary. Only one major ham radio manufacturer (Icom) supports D-STAR. None of the others have announced any intention to. In fact, one, (Yaesu) has come up with a digital protocol of their own. Plus, there’s plenty of hams utilizing used P25 digital equipment. So not only is it not “open,” it’s also not really a “standard.” The actual standard for local VHF/UHF voice communications remains FM, because that’s what all manufacturers support, and what the vast majority of repeaters continue to use.

D-STAR is the Wave of the Future

Highly unlikely. Digital modes in general are the wave of the future and will probably eventually displace FM and most other analog modes for most communications. But it’s hardly clear that D-STAR is the technology which will prevail. In fact, its lack of widespread adoption argues against it being the digital technology which will prevail. More than likely, that will end up being some yet-to-be-invented mode which offers far better weak-signal performance than either D-STAR of FM, and audio quality at least as good as current analog modes. That way, users will put up with the unavoidable “fall off a cliff” because it will happen significantly further out than where FM starts getting a bit hissy and choppy.

D-STAR, being Digital, Offers Better Audio Quality

No, it doesn’t. It offers worse audio quality. This isn’t CD-style digital audio we’re talking about; there’s significantly less bandwidth available than that on a ham radio channel. Circumstances dictate a slower sampling rate and very aggressive compression. Lossy compression. Quite audibly lossy compression, in fact.

It gets even more dramatic in weak-signal situations. Like all digital modes, a D-STAR signal quickly “drops off a cliff” when usable range is exceeded. Audio gets totally lost, first little bits, then big bits, then all of it. And it’s a much more disconcerting and intelligibility-compromising loss of information than one gets in analog FM, where rising background hiss provides an early warning and the drop-outs are not so sudden or so total.

D-STAR Is Needed Because We’re Out of Repeater Pairs

Maybe in Manhattan, Tokyo, or LA this is the case but for the vast majority of the Earth’s surface it is not. Most places have plenty of repeater pairs available. Others, such as most big cities that fall short of being megalopolises, might be short on empty repeater pairs but the repeaters themselves end up being mostly empty (you can listen all day and you’re lucky if you as much as hear another station ID). There’s plenty of room for more chit-chat.

D-STAR Therefore Is Useless

Not so fast. Nothing says you must use it for voice. There’s two parts to D-STAR, a CODEC for moving between the analog and digital worlds, and a way of sending streams of bits over the airwaves. The former is actually where most of the cost for the equipment comes in (since it’s a proprietary CODEC), while the latter is 100% open. So if you need a digital point-to-point link, the technology has some use.

In other words, it’s a specialized mode for special applications, not any sort of general-purpose replacement for FM.

It’s Not Just DMR, Either

Published at 12:21 on 14 April 2013

Pretty much all communications-grade digital voice protocols sound awful, for the same reason that DMR sounds awful. Probably the least awful-sounding one, from the samples I’ve heard, is NXDN. Even that can’t hold a candle to plain old analog FM, however.

It all leaves me wondering if digital is just plain the wrong answer to cramming a voice signal into a smaller bandwidth. I’m inclined to thing using something like SSB plus an intelligent, software-defined receiver (with sophisticated noise filtering and precise, automatic carrier insertion) might be better.

Noise tends to be not a super-big issue at VHF and above, anyhow, so losing a degree of immunity to it might not be such a big deal, particularly if one uses digital signal processing techniques to remove as much of it as possible. SSB can sound as good as AM (which, unless noise gets in the way, blows digital out of the water when it comes to audio fidelity and overall intelligibility), provided you insert the carrier at just the right spot when receiving.

As a further plus, a voice-quality SSB signal uses half or less the bandwidth per channel of any of the digital protocols currently out there.

Sometimes the right answer to a question about employing a new technology is not to employ it at all (or, in this case, to employ it, but in a significantly different way than originally proposed).

Digital Mobile Radio Sounds Awful

Published at 21:16 on 10 April 2013

Somewhat obscure geeky things that other ham radio operators generally overlook tend to interest me.

It’s one reason I bought a 900 MHz transceiver at the Puyallup swap meet last month; it’s a band with almost no equipment built and marketed to ham radio operators. It took some searching to find something suitable (in this case, an HT marketed to business and government users which could be unlocked and programmed on that amateur radio band).

Probably for the same reason, DMR (Digital Mobile Radio, commonly known by its Motorola trademark MOTOTRBO) piqued my interest. Unlike 900 MHz (which is very quiet), there’s actually a smattering of operators using that mode on the 70cm band.

The downside is that the audio sounds positively awful (I’ve been listening to it on the net here). Think cheezy sci-fi voice effects from the 70s, sometimes so heavy that one must strain to hear what is being said.

Maybe it shouldn’t have come as a complete surprise. Unlike digital home entertainment audio, greater fidelity was never a goal for DMR. Instead, the goal was to cram as many channels into as little radio spectrum as possible.

If that’s your main goal, quality is going to suffer. There’s nothing particularly magic (or evil) about digital technology in this regard; one can use analog techniques to compress signal bandwidth, and those have a negative effect on audio quality as well.

I haven’t done much listening to it, but I’ve heard the “official” digital protocol for amateur radio in the VHF and UHF bands, D-Star, suffers similarly.

I think the chief upshot of this awful sound is that we cannot expect any such digital mode to last nearly as long as analog voice modes have lasted. As technology improves, ways will be found to make audio suffer less as it is compressed into a digital signal. It still won’t be high fidelity, mind you, but it won’t leave the listener straining to discern speech, either.

Because of present poor audio quality, the high likelihood of rapid obsolescence, and the significantly higher cost of digital over analog, digital voice is unlikely to be more than a bit player on the ham bands in the near future.

To that can be added adoption issues. A business licensee is a single organization; it can decide to go digital, make the investment in equipment, and issue all employees new radios. We amateur radio operators are individuals making individual choices; this creates a high path dependency in favor of the status quo.

Moreover, the commercial and public service bands are much more congested, so being able to cram in more signals is more important there. Even so, I wouldn’t expect present-day digital technologies to have comparable longevity to, say, analog FM.

Blue Ocean Radio, 0045 – 0100 UTC, 5 Aug 2012

Published at 21:47 on 7 August 2012

One of the things I did last weekend was to take the shortwave receiver camping and to do a little hunting for weekend pirate broadcasters. I was not to be disappointed, and ran across a very nice signal (easily the best signal I’ve ever received from a pirate broadcaster) from Blue Ocean Radio on 6930 kHz AM.

Blue Ocean Radio

HD Radio is the Quadraphonic Stereo of the 2010’s

Published at 13:40 on 4 February 2012

After having listened to HD broadcasts regularly for about a month, that’s the inevitable conclusion. It’s there, stations have spent a lot of money on enabling themselves to broadcast it, but consumers have almost universally not adopted it and even broadcasters don’t take it very seriously anymore. Ergo, it’s going to die in the not-too-distant future.

Exhibit A: Knowing that the chips which decode HD into audio are proprietary, I wondered just how pricy they might be. After a bunch of Google searching (the magic keywords have slipped my memory and I can’t furnish a link at the moment, sorry), I found out that the fee is around $50 per chip. The receiver I purchased from an Amazon storefront was made several years ago, came to me new in its packaging, and cost me $40. In other words, HD receivers are not selling and are being liquidated at below cost.

Exhibit B: KING-FM‘s HD signal went off the air for a few days in the wake of last month’s ice storm. There was never any announcement to this fact on the air, or for that matter on KING-FM’s web site. By contrast, if they lost their analog stereo subcarrier, I find it inconceivable that there would not be both regular on-the-air announcements and a mention on their web site about it.

Moreover, I listen somewhat regularly to “the Evergreen Channel,” the program that airs on KING-FM’s HD2 digital subcarrier. Whenever they solicit listener contributions, they instruct you to “click the donate button on your player.” Never is any mention made of what listeners on HD radio should do; there is a presumption here that those of us who listen on HD are such a small minority that we’re not worth worrying about.

Exhibit C: For the past month or more, the HD subcarrier has been absent from the KUOW2 transmitter on 91.7 kHz, as evidenced by the following message on their web site:

KUOW2 HD SERVICES OFF AIR

We apologize for the break in our KUOW2 HD services. Our engineers are working to fix the problem.

Hey, at least they rated HD worth a mention on their web site; that’s more than one can say for KING-FM. But, to reiterate, it’s been this way for at least a month (i.e. ever since I’ve been trying to receive an HD signal from that transmitter). Obviously, it’s not a very high priority item for their engineers. Again, I find it inconceivable that they would take such a long time to restore the analog stereo subcarrier to their transmitter.

I would not be surprised, in fact, if KUOW decides to simply forget about HD on their second transmitter and if in a few months all mention of HD one day simply vanishes without explanation from the web page for that transmitter. That’s probably what’s going to happen to the vast majority of HD broadcasts in the coming five years or so: they will continue until something breaks in the station’s HD hardware, at which point it will be pronounced by management as not worth spending the money to fix and the service will be silently discontinued.

To reiterate, this will not be a surprise when it happens.

First, consider the cost: I would not have paid several hundred dollars for such a receiver. The only reason I purchased one is that I have a crappy slow Internet connection and cannot reliably stream audio. It was worth a one-time expense of $40 to have unlimited access to the BBC. At several hundred dollars per receiver, I would have just paid for better Internet service. That would cost a more, sure, but I’d then be able to stream audio from more than just the BBC, as well as watch videos on demand.

Second, consider the reliability: HD is still considerably more temperamental than analog FM, which is temperamental enough on an inside antenna: one is continually having issues with multipath interference and loss of signal strength causing loss of the stereo subcarrier. But at least with analog FM, one still gets an audible signal when that happens. With HD Radio, the signal suddenly and with no warning whatsoever vanishes completely. At least at home it’s possible to erect a good external antenna on the roof. In a car, you’re simply stuck with a small whip, and you will hit weak-signal areas as you drive around. It’s no wonder automakers have avoided adding HD Radio to the receivers they install in vehicles.

Finally, consider the improvement in sound quality: It’s very modest. Frequency modulation was designed to offer better sound quality than amplitude modulation, and it succeeds admirably in this regard; the difference in audio quality between an AM signal and an FM one is profound. In contrast, it’s difficult for me to discern any such difference between analog FM and HD Radio.

So I fully expect my $40 investment to become an interesting conversation piece about a mostly forgotten era in radio broadcasting in the decades to come.