There's a lot of unusual and flaky design in the boring plumbing parts of these things that makes them prone to self destruction. For example, using the MCU to make discrete buck regulators that power the MCU is a o.O choice that I think has no reasonable justification. There are perfectly wonderful multi output integrated chips with external synchronization that cost almost no money, take up less space, are more performant, and make it impossible for software to immolate the hardware upon which it runs.
Gifted embedded software, but the electronics is simply not that robust. The company could really use an electrical engineer to complement its software engineer.
The QMX works well enough that I'm not going to critique the choice of voltage regulation or other plumbing bits. The boring parts work, even if they weren't designed by a professional EE. It uses low power on receive and is reliable, which are my primary concerns. I don't expect to get the same design as a team of Yaesu engineers would use on a $5k transceiver. If it's not hurting RF performance, then it is fairly low on the wish list.
Overall, the kit is still a killer value and buildable by someone who can follow directions and is decent at soldering. This is in stark contrast to many other kits which require a lot of sleuthing to figure out issues because the instructions aren't clear, or they changed some components and didn't update their documentation. And these other kits often don't have any better design for their power management sides either.
There have been a few board revisions to address some of the bigger issues that have come up with early board spins, and I like that mods have been made public for most of the early builders to keep their kits working.
The most common problem seem to be blown transistors from transmitting into a mismatched load, and that is mostly the operator's fault and common in many radios. I like that Hans put some SWR protection in the QMX to keep the finals from blowing as often as they might.
Comments
There's a lot of unusual and flaky design in the boring plumbing parts of these things that makes them prone to self destruction. For example, using the MCU to make discrete buck regulators that power the MCU is a o.O choice that I think has no reasonable justification. There are perfectly wonderful multi output integrated chips with external synchronization that cost almost no money, take up less space, are more performant, and make it impossible for software to immolate the hardware upon which it runs.
Gifted embedded software, but the electronics is simply not that robust. The company could really use an electrical engineer to complement its software engineer.
The QMX works well enough that I'm not going to critique the choice of voltage regulation or other plumbing bits. The boring parts work, even if they weren't designed by a professional EE. It uses low power on receive and is reliable, which are my primary concerns. I don't expect to get the same design as a team of Yaesu engineers would use on a $5k transceiver. If it's not hurting RF performance, then it is fairly low on the wish list.
Overall, the kit is still a killer value and buildable by someone who can follow directions and is decent at soldering. This is in stark contrast to many other kits which require a lot of sleuthing to figure out issues because the instructions aren't clear, or they changed some components and didn't update their documentation. And these other kits often don't have any better design for their power management sides either.
There have been a few board revisions to address some of the bigger issues that have come up with early board spins, and I like that mods have been made public for most of the early builders to keep their kits working.
The most common problem seem to be blown transistors from transmitting into a mismatched load, and that is mostly the operator's fault and common in many radios. I like that Hans put some SWR protection in the QMX to keep the finals from blowing as often as they might.