Wouxun KG-UVD1P Handheld Tranceiver Review

Downloads:

• KG-UVD1P Official Programming Software 2.0 (276)
• KG-UVD1P Wide Frequency Mod/Unlock - 1KG-xxx-unlock.exe (586)

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I just got a KG-UVD1P handheld transceiver from 409shop. The radio is probably the best one you can get for the price (around $120), and my experience with the unit so far has been, for the most part, a positive one, apart from a few… component failures…

Included with the radio itself:

• 1400mAh lithium-ion battery pack
• Belt clip
• Stubby SMA rubber duck antenna
• Kenwood-compatible single earbud with PTT mic and clip
• Charger dock
• 12v car cigarette lighter adapter for charger dock
• AC adapter for charger dock
• Manual

Other accessories used:

• Car battery eliminator
• Gold-plated male SMA to female BNC connector
• Surecom SC951 antenna, BNC connection
• Generic Kenwood-compatible speaker mic with rotatable clip, 3.5mm mono audio output jack, and red PTT LED
• 9-pin DB9 RS-232 serial programming cable

Summary of everything, keeping it as TL;DR as possible:

• Update (02/01/2011): The new chargers being shipped by Wouxun seem better engineered than the old ones. I would still be cautious and test everything with current-limited power supplies and test loads before leaving it running overnight.
• DON’T buy or use the car battery eliminator or it could EXPLODE. It claims to accept 11-40v, but THIS IS NOT TRUE. It ONLY accepts voltages up to ~12.5v, any more and it shorts the input and draws large amounts of current. DO NOT operate the adapter at more than 12.5v or it could melt/explode if too much current is drawn. I’m working on a buck/boost 10-14v to 12.5v regulator to fix this.
• DON’T use the included cigarette lighter or it could EXPLODE. The old charging dock does not seem to work with battery voltages greater than 12.5v.
  
• Don’t use the AC adapter without testing it first, some units have dangerous defects. Get an output regulated 12v 1A adapter from somewhere else and use it instead. Mine works normally, but others have not been so lucky.
• The charger dock itself is low quality. It’s a bit difficult to plug the radio into at times, and I’m not sure about the charging circuit but it seems to work, and it turns itself off properly.
• The included antenna isn’t that great, but it seems to work fine as far as I’ve tested it. It’s got a water resistant lip on the SMA connector. I prefer the Surecom antenna instead because of its resonant frequencies and radiation patterns, as well as the greater degree of flexibility.
• The radio itself is quite nice. It’s FCC type-accepted in the US. Solidly constructed. The tuning dial is digital, it has a backlit keypad, TX/RX LEDs, and a flashlight. Turning on the radio is accomplished using the volume control, which prevents you from blasting your ears with static by accident. The audio quality of both the speaker and microphone is excellent. Good CTCSS/DCS/PL tone capabilities.
• The version that I received plays DTMF tones for as long as the keys are held down, which is a vast improvement over the previous firmware, which only played the tones for a short amount of time.
• In VFO mode at least, it has dual VFOs that can be set in any combination of VHF and UHF. Only one of them can be in TX/RX mode at a time. It’s easy and quick to switch between modes. Useful if you want to operate on a bunch of frequencies at once. Each VFO has its own settings page, but it’s not completely clear in the radio’s menu which settings are local and global. It makes more sense in the programming software.
• As far as I know, there’s no crossband repeat function. That would come in handy, but it’s not too often that I need to use it.
• It comes with this really weird voice prompt, selectable in English or Chinese. I found it to be completely hilarious. It has some useful purpose, but after a while, I ended up turning it off.
• And no cheap handheld would be without roger beeps! You can pick between start, end, and both. I use both during informal communications, but I turn it off otherwise.
• It’s easily moddable using the serial cable. I have the TX/RX range unlocked and expanded to:
  • 118 to 213 MHz on VHF
  • 214 to 600 MHz on UHF

  …which leaves almost 500 MHz of gapless coverage! If you enter 213 MHz into the software, it actually goes up to 213.999 MHz on the VFO. The VFO is not stable at ~105 MHz, it seems to pick up stations on ~162 MHz for some reason.

• The radio itself does have a few shortcomings:
  • It picks up more QRM than I really want it to, enough to trigger a squelch setting of 4 on strong spikes of static, but it does receive very well.
  • You can’t use the VFO and named frequencies at the same time. I don’t really want to use named frequency lists anyway, so I’m okay with this. It would come in handy, though.
  • The tuning dial doesn’t go fast enough for my liking. I wish it would tune by larger increments in response to faster spins of the dial. You can always type in frequencies or use the up/down keys instead.
  • I wish you could set custom VFO step sizes, or have the step size be ignored when you’re entering frequencies using the keypad. I like setting the VFO step size to 5KHz because it gives you a lot of precision, especially with weirdly spaced channels, or with drifting signals. It’s also a nice, even number. With a 5KHz step, if you type in some number like 144.002, it becomes 144.000 instead. I don’t want to have to switch the other step sizes just to get odd numbers, like 6.25KHz
  • The 1750Hz burst tone worked for me initially, but now it’s not working anymore. I’m not sure what I did that would have caused this… if anyone has any pointers on getting it working, I’d like to hear from them.
  • It’s slow at scanning. I have an FRS radio that scans faster.
  • The programming cable takes a lot of tries before it decides to work. But once it’s working, it’s all good. You just make sure the connections are secure and keep trying.
• People have reported issues with getting the USB cable to work. It’s partially Windows’ fault, but it’s probably also Wouxun’s fault for their poorly coded USB drivers. If you really need a USB connection for programming, i.e. you have a laptop that isn’t 10 years old and lacks a serial port, then buy the RS-232 cable and a USB to RS-232 adapter. It’ll be more reliable.

I haven’t tested all of the features, and some of them I have little use for, so your mileage may vary.

I don’t really feel like writing anything else at this point… So, let me talk rant about those scary ‘DON’Ts’ I mentioned above. This is the negative part of the review…

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Some day, perhaps in an emergency, you might need to power your radio from a large battery pack, or from a car, so I purchased the car battery eliminator. It says “MEGAVOLT” on the inside, and has some specs written down as well – apparently it accepts 11-40v DC. I decided to test out the car battery eliminator by plugging it into a 9-pound 12v 12AH AGM battery using an adapter. I specifically did not plug the eliminator into the radio, for reasons that will soon become clear.

At first, nothing happened, and I disconnected the clamps immediately. The small LED on the cigarette lighter cable did not light up, and no voltage was detected on the battery eliminator’s output pads. However, the cigarette lighter’s coiled cable was very warm to the touch… I figured that too much voltage was being dropped in the cable, preventing the DC converter from starting, so I used my own adapter that I had on-hand to connect the battery to the battery eliminator. Boy, what a mistake that was.

A small click emanated from the battery eliminator, indicating to me that it was working, but then I realized that the device was supposed to be made of solid-state electronics… so why would there even be a click? Before I could think any further, another click startled me, and then a large cracking noise was heard. And then the sizzling began, followed by the sharp odor of the magic smoke, which reminded me of polyvinyl chloride. I cut the power immediately and tried not to breathe the fuming, toxic gases that filled the air.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that dramatic… but seriously, if I decided to plug this thing into a car, I might not have noticed anything for quite a bit, and it would have dumped way more current into the device… it could have exploded, or melted, or burned someone, or choked them to death with toxic gas… This adapter is very poorly made, in both the engineering and manufacturing sense. What happened couldn’t have been an overvoltage condition, because it’s supposed to be rated up to 40v. It’s just a piece of crap, and you’d be better off buying one and just using it as a case to build your own DC converter inside. I can pretty much guarantee that anyone’s homebrew adapter will function better.

Now, the hilarious part about this is that it happened again. For some strange reason, I still wanted to find a way to power this radio off of my 9-pound battery. I looked in the box and noticed a cigarette lighter adapter I forgot to use. It looked almost identical to the other one, except it had “Wouxun” printed on one side in blue lettering, and two Chinese characters in red on the other side. So what did I do wrong? Apparently, actually using it is bad, because I was greeted with a familiar click-SNAP and a cloud of even worse-smelling smoke than before. Now, the charger is busted too, and there’s no way I can charge the nonstandard batteries. I’m now in the process of bothering 409shop to compensate me for these defective products.

These ‘exploding charger’ stories are widespread… some people have reported the included AC charger exploding, even. It’s pretty scary to think that some company is selling completely unsafe mains equipment. When I get a replacement charger, I’m going to be using my own 12v adapter, not the included one.

Also… what’s up with the 6-unit charger that is available from Wouxun? It costs more than a hundred bucks… and I can bet that the insides are wired up the same way as the cheap charger. It’ll probably suffer the same explosive fate, too.

Someone should come up with a decent aftermarket charger for these things that doesn’t double as a timed explosive…

Feel free to leave any questions or comments you may have.

Until next time, 73.

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