The Quansheng TK11 First Impressions Video

Yes, it's now released and for sale. People have been waiting for this radio to drop for quite some time. For a while it seemed like it would never happen, but the day has finally arrived. I hope it lives up to expectations. It's got lots of cool features and the built quality looks great. So, what advantages does it have over a modified firmware Quansheng. Well, from what I can quickly see. It can go lower than an Egzumer'd Quansheng. Which goes to 18MHz. The TK11 goes down to 0.153. I presume that's KHz and not MHz. Transmit power is up to "10 Watts". Out the box the Quansheng TK11 can transmit on CB. Two antenna connections. The second one is a T-Shape, which deals with all the lower bands like short wave.

The Quansheng TK11 can be found for sale here

 
Battery is 3000mAh or 2500mAh depending on where you look. The TK 11 goes all the way up to 1160MHz. Apparently it is waterproof. And I'm sure there will be some reviewers putting that to the test. I can wait to see those results. All in all the Quansheng TK11 [is it the "8" or "5"] looks promising. I'm not sure what chip is inside this thing, but hopefully, once the mod developers take a look under the hood, they might be able to turn it into some sort of super radio. Out the box it is rather impressive anyway. No need to modify it for most people. But the temptation is always there if some mods do become available.

Quansheng Squelch Sensitivity CHIRP

I made a post a while back about the Quansheng and its lowest squelch setting being a bit too high. You can read that post here. The high squelch even on a low squelch setting of 1 led to choppy signals coming through, despite them being quite good signals. Anyway, this led me to look for an answer. Could it be the Egzumer firmware causing this issue. Did the developers make the lowest squelch a bit too high and possibly update this issue in the future with an Egzumer update.

The squelch settings from my Quansheng in CHIRP

Well it turns out that CHIRP has the ability to change the squelch settings on the K5-8 / UVK6, and also UV-5R Plus [here]. So I installed CHIRP, got my Quansheng details uploaded and had a look at the settings. I could see the squelch values and was tempted to change them. But I wasn't sure what numbers to put in and was scared of putting the wrong values in and bricking the radio. So I left it and did a bit of reading on the Internet.

I found out from reading on GitHub that the squelch values are on the EPROM [deep in the core settings I believe] and will only accept certain values. If the wrong values are added and then uploaded back to the radio using CHIRP, I think it can really mess things up. I don't know what the correct values are so I left it.

I didn't think it was worth potentially breaking the radio just for the occasional choppy signal. I can just disable the squelch completely when its choppy. I would probably leave it alone if I were you. But If you do decide to go through with this in CHIRP, I would appreciate a comment here to let me know how you got on. And, if it went well, what are the correct values.

Realistic Pro-26 Common Problem

The buzzing / failed speaker [see a video of the audio problem here] that I experienced with my old Realistic Pro-26 scanner must be more common a problem than I initially thought. Since I sold mine on eBay for spares or repairs I have come across another 3 with what looked to be the exact same issue. I even contacted one of the sellers and asked him to explain the problem at bit more. I asked him, when he plugged in earphones does it sound OK, or is the buzzing noise still there. He said it was still there.

This was exactly the same with mine, and I think this means that something on the motherboard inside has failed and will need replacing. So if you haven't got experience with radio electronics / soldering / fault finding etc I would say don't be tempted to buy one of these radios that has this fault just because it is being sold cheap. If you need to send it somewhere for repair it may end up costing you a fair bit of money to get fixed. You may as well buy a fully working Realistic Pro-26 for more money to begin with.

Many old scanners suffer from common problems over time. Things fail. It reminds me a bit of the AOR AR8000. It's an old but still quite capable receiver that can be prone to keypad issues, where the keypad starts to fail and buttons stop working. The good thing about this problem is that it is repairable some of the time, and it's quite easy to do it yourself. All that's needed is a membrane pad repair kit. But these can sometimes be quite expensive, so look around as some can be found cheap if searching for something similar. Like "remote membrane control repair kit" or "Electronics Cleaning Repair Kits" etc.

I suppose it should be expected for thing to fail on old scanners. I mean, the two mentioned here are over 3 decades old. And as great as they are, things do break after many years of use. I wonder if any of the modern radio equipment would last as long. I'd also be interesting in hearing what others have to say about their scanners in terms of reliability. What's the most reliable scanner you have ever owned? And is it still in use today.

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. 

Update. I have since come to find out after a bit of research that the squelch can be edited lower in CHIRP. I don't use CHIRP but might have a look at it now to see if I can lower the squelch. Would be excellent if it actually works. Will update with a post if I do it and it works.

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!

    

New Box Design For the K5-8

Well, it's a new box for what I'm used to. I've ordered a fair few Qanshengs and the box is always the same. More compact, all brown, and fatter. This box is different. The inner tray plastic is also different. It's clear and seems a bit tougher. I've seen many people, most of them probably resellers of these radios complain about the inner tray arriving damaged from transit / customs etc. They have to travel far and wide all over the world. Maybe this new box will be better. Mine arrived undamaged, so yep, looks promising. And inside is less crammed.

Front

Back

Inside - one of these was in there

I was going to order a K5 (99). Some call it the K6 I think. Or should it be the K7. You know, the newest model out right now. But I have heard they have some issues so decided to go with the K 5 (8). It's my favourite model out of them all. I know they are all mostly the same, but the design on this one is more nicer to me.

-lcr