ANYTONE 5189 4M FM First Impressions

Due to my failure to obtain one of these 70MHz amateur radio rigs to review on CQHQ I have with kind permission reproduced a blog post from G8UBJ's Hamdy Spot go there to see the rest of the photographs. This is followed by an email from Paul M0LRE with his first impressions. The Anytone and MyDel are the same rig by the way.

The ANYTONE 5189 4M FM Mobile

Martin Lynch and Son have taken delivery of their first batch of the new ANYTONE 5189 Transceivers. These cover 4M and output is about 40 Watts on high power. I think the specification is 60 watts so some internal tinkering may be considered in the future? That said the 20 watts difference is not great and probably won´t make a difference on the air.The radio come nicely packaged with a double fused power lead, fist microphone, mobile mount and of course a fairly easy to read manual. The manufacturer is Qixiang Electronics (Never heard of them!)

I have only just bought this today (24th November), one of the initial batch of ten. Initial on the air testing has been positive.It has a very large integrated heat sink. I imagine that this can actually dissipate the power on 60 watts.

The rig is a little sensitive to SWR, changing the coax length by 1/4 wavelength resulted in just shy of 40 watts out.

I took a few photos of the display, with and without the flash. As you can see its not huge, but acceptable for mobile use. Still no S meter...sigh!

Tuning of the VFO is on the front panel dial (Finally no more up down buttons!). The dial doubles for volume if you press it once. The squelch is on a menu (Can´t have em all....) but can be defeated by a button press for those DX contacts?

On the air reports were good although the default deviation of 25Khz was too wide and had to be turned down to 12.5K

Sensitivity was slightly better than my ASCOM SE550 and the integral speaker was very clear and produced good audio. the microphone is a good size and comes with up/down buttons for mobile use. It connects to the rig using the RJ45 type connector, similar to most modern rigs.

There is a speaker jack at the rear.

This is one of the first batch and the next batch should be in before Christmas. At £149.95 they aren´t giving them away but if you compare it to the Yaesu FT-2900 single band 2M transceiver its not too expensive and hand helds aside the only new 4M transceiver available on the market (So put it on your Christmas list now?)

Email from Paul M0LRE with his first impressions.

Hi ,

Just thought I'd drop you a quick line to say that LAM also have the said radio on there website http://www.lamcommunications.net/shop/product_info.php?products_id=621

I actually have one, on 4m and although I've only had it a couple of days and not really had much chance to put it through it's paces yet, first impressions are it knocks spots off a Garex or AKD 4001.

The radio looks good for the price and is slightly smaller than my current radio for 4m (Motorola GM350) and is putting out a Swr/power meter measured 40watts ( I thought that the 60watts was a little optimistic, but still more than my GM350 which is set for 25 watts)

On receive it seems to perform quite well and as well as my Motorola (I can hear everyone even at a distance I can hear on the Motorola to the same levels) sorry, it's not any more technical than that but I don't have the test kit and I've not really had a chance to use it much yet.

As the spec states 3 bandwidth settings, Mines set to narrow as you'd expect for 12.5khz channels and again sounds good against and GM350, It has a quite large microphone, but still fits in the hand well and also has channel/frequency up and down buttons which is handy when mobile.

There are lots of memories although I've not set any up as I feel that you can get away with having the radio in VFO mode for 4m. There are the usual features, that you'd find modern PMR kit (CTCSS, Rpt shift, etc) again a bit redundant for our 4m band plan.

These are just a few of my first impressions, to round up I like it, it seems to work well and would definitely have one over a AKD/Garex if I were starting out on the band. As you've said on your blog, I'm sure they'll sell well.

73 Paul W M0LRE