Will also post to FB.
I ordered this air band radio kit from China a few weeks ago and
received it a few days ago. Yesterday I spent most of the day assembling
it. I’m an experienced kit builder and believe me, it was difficult.
The kit came with a single sheet of paper, on one side was a discription
and the other side was the schematic. The description was written in
Chinglish and was no help in assembling the kit. The PC board had a part
number, like C27, but no value. So each part had to be looked up on the
schematic to find out what the value was. But the schematic on the
paper and online was blurry and the part numbers and values were nearly
impossible to read. This made the kit very difficult to assemble
correctly and most inexperienced kit builders would find it too
difficult, with many mistakes being made.
I spent more than 2 hours going to the schematic and puzzling out the
part numbers, then puzzling out the proper values for the parts. This
was in addition to the time I spent finding each part, inserting it
properly, soldering it in and clipping off the leads. This kit was
easier to do than my previous kit because there were no coils to wind.
The coils were a part of the printed circuit traces, spirals on the
board. No tuning to do, just solder the capacitors.
I finally finished with the assembly. I had to double check as I was
assembling, tracing the leads between parts to see that they
corresponded to the parts on the schematic, so my checks after assembly
were more like the third time. I hooked it up to a short antenna,
speaker and the power supply and prepared for the sight and smell of
smoke. But I didn’t get anything, other than a click on the speaker.
Volume was up and the squelch was off, so I used a small screwdriver to
turn the slug in the IF can. After adjusting the slug for the most hiss,
I didn’t have the volume control turned up, maybe a quarter turn. No
matter where I adjusted the tuning, I heard nothing but hiss.
