Well, mine got delivered on friday. Put it thru it's paces this morning. Meh, its ok i suppose. First off, it has a cheaper feel to it. Hard to explain. It feels more plastic and cheaper than a 959, 148, 29 etc. Doesn't have that heft to it. Its put together solid, no play in the knobs/pots, controls are solid feeling, no solder blobs, cold joints or mess ups on the circuit board on the one i got. Output power was set up correctly for the most part, on am, 3/4w on low and 4w on high. I dropped it to 1/2w on low. Am modulation was set at around 80% with a 1k tone. I bumped that up to 100% of course. SSB power was dead on at 12w. Now the bad, the frequency alignment was not good at all! Total ballpark alignment. AM was off just a bit, LSB was high just a hair and USB was waaaay off. About 48hz low, yikes! I think they might have skipped the USB part of the alignment lol. Soooo i gave it a full alignment for the heck of it and it talks and hears good now. Talking to myself for like 3min on the dummy load presented no substantial frequency drift. Need to have a full ssb qso to determine the true outcome on that front. The white meter and light is REALLY white. In videos i saw it didn't look that bad, looked to have a good balance. Nope, this thing is white and bright. I will always have a heart for that old school soft yellowish glow of meters and dials so its an unfair biased opinion on my part. But For me, its just too white. in my opinion the radio is fine for the low price and the build quality / alignment reflects that. Is it gonna be my everyday talker? No unfortunately, its going on the shelf and will probably be sold if i come across someone in need of a radio some day. Thats my review on it....
