Alinco Radios

I know Alinco isn't as popular as some other equipment makers but they do have a couple of interesting new radios out. One that I saw and played with a bit at the Hamvention is the DJ-G7:

I think this is something really neat because it not only does 2m and 70cm but also 23cm, or 1.2ghz. You don't really see a whole lot of equipment that does 1.2 so I thought that was really cool. It does 2m/70cm at up to 5w and 1.2 at up to 1w. Additionally, it's true dual receive and it has a wideband receiver that goes from 530khz to 1.3ghz, minus analog cellular. (824-849.995,869-895.995 blocked) I thought I read at the show that it was all-mode receive, but I can't see that on their website now. It is just showing AM/FM/WFM.

Go check it out.

Additionally, and I was tuned in to this by someone on the softrock40 mailing list, Alinco has brought out a DJ-X11 communication receiver. It looks a LOT like the DJ-G7 actually. If I had one of each in a drawer, I might accidentally leave the house with a scanner instead of my HT!

This covers from 50khz(!) to 1.3ghz, all-mode. AM/FM/WFM/SSB/CW. It is dual receive but it appears that the sub-band only covers 118-171 and 336-470. AM/NFM, blegh. I shouldn't complain, dual-receive at all in a communication receiver is pretty rare anyways. This radio makes up for it by having a really cool feature. It has IQ and 10.7mhz IF output. With the IQ output, you can plug directly into a soundcard and use it directly as a SDR (Software Defined Radio) Very cool! I'm not familar with what the IF output could be used for but it's nice to have anyways. Again, this is something very rare for this sort of thing. It also has a frequency counter and "Flash tune" feature to tune into nearby radio signals. You can get a cable to control all functions from a computer. Very nice indeed.

Go check it out.