THE MOST ILLEGAL CB RADIO EVER!!?? | QUANSHENG UVK58

[Music] yeah hello Andy Andy you got hear welcome back to the channel guys hope everyone's doing well today we're going to talk about this little bad boy you've probably seen it if you're into radio you would have seen this radio it's been around for a little while it's the Quang UV 5k8 nearly got it right it's the UV k58 so what's interesting about this little radio then it's just another Chinese juill band radio there's hundreds of them about now you know like a bing what's special about this radio well you can see already on the screen it looks slightly different like it's got some secrets to hide away behind so what's interesting about this old radio is that inside it has a very powerful RF chip called the beckon 4818 what this in a nutshell means is by loading some clever firmware on here by a community that's kind of appeared um making software for this thing you can have a radio that covers from 18 MHz all the way to 1300 mahz and it will transmit in those ranges too there are some it's not going to be completely like you're not going to get everything for nothing but this is a cheap radio and the firmware these guys have created is absolutely astonishing so I'm not going to go into too much detail about the different firmware types there's been loads of videos about this already but look just to give you a teaser if you're not familiar with this already here is a spectrum display showing 3 mahz in the 2 m handband i mean it's just nuts for a little radio like this now many of you will be aware that there's been lots of videos on this little radio in action especially from this guy um om0 he's done some fantastic videos of this little radio in action showing um 10 meters the 10 M amiter BAND the 11 M CB band um you know going downwards into the HF it it's absolutely astonishing really um and this firmware is the firmware the latest firmware at the time of this video from um fak chei I'll leave a link in the description for that as you can imagine there's a lot of excitement around this at the moment so things are obviously going to you know keep progressing with these firmwares but I mean I still haven't figured it all out is there's so much to it it's it's really interesting anyway in the true Spirit of amateur radio I wanted to do some tests for myself with this thing so in particular what I'm interested in is the transmit how much power does it put out on the different bands it appears to transmit you can't stupid not going to right so to start off with non-scientific test I've just put a CB antenna on the top of it um and we're going to see if I can hear my mate down the road yeah hello Andy Andy you got a copy on wow well I can hear him you here so before we get carried away with this thing we've already seen that it's a great receiver and it's picking up a CB signal about 3 or 4 miles down the road absolutely brilliant but before we start going transmitting anywhere it's really important to realize that whilst this appears to be a great receiver it's not actually designed to transmit on anything other than 2 m 70 c so if you start transmitting outside of those bands you're going to be probably spitting out RF in all sorts of places mainly the harmonics so all radios you know if you start at a fundamental frequency of what you set the radio to you'll have a second harmonic at two times that frequency so if you're transmitting on 70 it will be 140 and then SE on two times three times four times now normally these are filtered out if the radio is actually kind of designed for those bands this won't be so I can tell you now that if you if you transmit on 70 MHz is going to be a very strong harmonic on 140 MHz but that's not ideal at all and that is why we've got one of these tiny sa meters here so that we can analyze what these harmonics are doing and also there's some other issues as well that you might come across with sporus um harmonics as well so it's even more RF that's spitting out in all sorts of places so this is really important to understand because if you want to measure power you obviously can't measure power if you've got lots of different frequencies being emitted from one transmitter because how do you know where that power is going to be um measured correctly so that's why something like having a an actual Spectrum analyzer which I mean in this day age the fact that you can get a spectrum analyzer in the palm of your hand is is pretty Bonkers um but basically using something like this you'll be able to see the power output and everything you're basically going to get a snapshot of what this radio is chucking out in full visual format so this goes from0 Herz up to 800 so to put this into practical terms and show you what I'm talking about here we've got a radio we're going into an attenuation device here which drops the signal significantly because you can't just feed 5 watts into this spectrum analyz it will just absolutely you know annihilate it so we've got a minus 40 DB attenuator here which is going to drop the signal significantly it's a 10 wat attenuator basically and on the tinsa what we're going to use it for is to measure the power output of this transmitter here so we're going to transmit and then we're going to see what power it puts out now I've configured this tinsa in a way that allows it to show um Watts which is pretty cool um and I've also adjusted the the gain here to minus 40 to compensate for this um damy load now it's not going to be 100% accurate because you get insertion losses and all this I've got these adapters here as well so that's not going to help but it is going to give us an idea of what actually happens if we transmit on an out of band frequency like 70 mahz so get ready for this I'm going to key the radio up and you can see here we've got two spikes now the first first spike is is virtually non-existent you can hardly see it and you can see here it's at 70.2 MHz which is about what I've got the radio set to it's not as I say this this actually isn't even calibrated this tin say um but um yeah so it's around that frequency there now the other you'll see here is at 140.6 call it 140 because you know the in accuracies but you can see here we're measuring 5.46 Watts on a 140 MHz better not k out for too long but we are transmitting into a dummy load so it's not going to get out too far so yeah as I say it's pretty cold isn't it you can see visually on the Spectrum where um you're getting a signal out which is quite cool so if we go back to our 70 MHz you can see it's about 12 M something like that 12.6 M it might be a bit less might be a bit more um but that will give you an idea of what you're actually putting out on that frequency that we' set so 70 MHz meanwhile 140 you're putting out the 4 5 wats and that is probably because the amplifier in here is designed for you know 2 m and 77 so what it's doing is effectively amplifying the second harmonic up to a 5 wat level so you can start to see it's not really a good idea transmitting somewhere like 70 MHz because the second harmonic is actually 140 and then that's just going to get boosted by the amplifier and also I didn't mention that it was transmitting on the third harmonic as well 210 MHz or thereabouts but very small signal again but like 70 MHz it's out of the range of the amplifier so that's why the signal is really small so I know what all the CB guys are going to be asking that have bought this how much power does it put out on 27 MHz right take note this is very important this is what happens when you transmit on the CB bands guys so 27 MHz you're getting 1.9 mowatt out hardly anything but and this ain't good at all you'll also have a slight little harmonic at around 54 mehz as you'd expect 2 * 27 is 54 and then on from that it gets worse you're going to basically be spitting out emissions all over the place so 550 mwatt at 80.9 MHz you're going to get 659 m going out 107 dangerously close to the airband and then you're going to get 617 M at 135 and then you're going to get 579 M at 162 and then up from there it's just in the mwatt range but yeah it's not good so yeah not a good idea to do that at all now it could be possible that you could design some band pass filters that you could use with this sort of thing I think before you did that you'd probably have to disable the amplifier inside this radio and once you did that it'd be really interesting because you'd have a really Broadband transmitter a bit like a hack RF which then you can maybe design a filter for and boost a particular signal that you wanted to use um with it I mean the radio itself is a great receiver I'll show you another example of this radio up against an icon 705 and a little um CRT 4 met set and the results are pretty astounding really so this is the rsgb news being read by MZ XTA um shout out to you Sim I spoke to you the other day and this is being received on a little any tone 779 not a CRT um just a magman in The Loft with a little vertical on on it for 4 M next I flicked over to the Quang I think it sounds pretty good 900 K on third day you are listening to gb2 RS the new forecasting service of the Radio Society Great Britain comes from the station of yo x-ray T located then I flicked over to the icon 705 could hardly hear it so I started filling around with um the preamps and stuff like that um very very noisy signal but as you usual it's solved by turning the display off on the 705 and then I was able to receive it similar to the other two [Music] radios finally I tested my ft 5D nothing at all so it would appear the big guys should be getting worried right now the fact that you can have a piece of Hardware like this for 20 quid and then put some firmware on it and it opens it up to just a whole new ball game is going to change the game it's changing the game already and massive respect to the guys that have written the firmware for this because I'm sure it hasn't been an easy ride at all as we start moving towards powerful RF devices on Silicon we're going to see some really interesting stuff happen and I suspect that this radio here is actually just a reference design from the company beckon that make the RF chip and all it's going to take is some Hardware guys to get on this project as well and we could start seeing external filters external amplifiers just expanding what this thing can do I really think this thing's got a future anyway guys hope you've enjoyed this one super excited stuff make sure you get one of these before they sell [Music] out [Music] [Music] oh

Channel: andy kirby

Views: 674,997

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Id: uuQFFNW5l0g

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023