Egzumer Needs a Squelch Lower Than One

Egzumer is great software for using to modify the Quansheng radios. It has many excellent features and is very easy to use. But one thing I have noticed that does annoy me a bit is the lowest squelch level. It reads number 1. But for this to be the lowest squelch setting, I think it is set a little too high. Some signals, which are not too bad in terms of how clear / strong they are, are choppy on the lowest squelch setting.

Disabling the squelch does get rid of the choppiness but then the squelch is making a heap of noise each time the transmission ends. This can not be stopped by pressing the M [menu button], or the middle side button if the squelch is set to off [zero]. So It would be great if there was a lower squelch setting of 0.5 so that all the faint signals could be heard without being choppy, or without having to disable the squelch completely [which is a squelch of 0 = disabled].

Other than that Egzumer is excellent. I have seen some people say that the Quansheng K5 / K6 etc are not really scanners. But they are. With Egzumer installed you get 200 channels to add frequencies to. These are scannable, so its basically a 200 channel scanner with tons of features. And the scanning works great. Each channel is totally customizable. You can change steps, mode [AM, NFM etc], Demodu and much more. A lot of the older scanners can not do this for individual channels, so yeah, it's really good. 

Inside My Home Base Scanner

Here is the inside of my old Home made airband scanner receiver. Circuit board: It has an airband chip inside called: R&EW 720 CH AIRBAND RX. l've wrote about this receiver before [at the link] so not going to talk about it much here. Just thought I would show some pictures of the inner workings in case you wanted to have a look! I'll talk to you soon. I'm going to be posting about some Quansheng / Antenna related stuff.

Home Made Airband Receiver Radio

Check out this old school home made airband receiver that I got from Scotland around 1 + years back. Has some issues but will make an excellent restoration project. I've got too many things going on myself to try and fix it so decided to sell it on eBay as spares or repairs. It wasn't up for sale for very long. Someone who loves home made stuff snapped it up really quickly.

It does have an issue where the read out from the dials at the front does not match the frequency. Its all topsy turvy. So I think its only really the front frequency dial mechanism that is faulty. Although I can not be completely sure.

Whilst it is faulty, it does actually work. It could pick up 1 air band transmission and a distant mainstream radio station. Not sure which one. That's all I could get it to pick up. Check out the video of it picking up Birmingham Airport [136.025MHz].

 

It comes with an antenna that I have posted about before on this blog. It's a piece of wire with an angled BNC connection. Old school cool. Works really well. I've tested it against normal antennas and it is just as good as them. And in some cases, better!