[arm-allstar] HobbyPCB RS-UV3

[Doug Crompton]

Be cautious. I have one and I have been using it for almost a year. I had
planned to do a howto on it but ran into problems. In theory it is a nice
board. It uses a Baofeng tri-band chip, the one used in many Baofeng
transceivers. To make it really clean it has added switched filters on the
front-end. RF wise it seems OK, very clean. I primarily use mine on 222 Mhz
as a local node.

But here is the problem. The PL does not work well. I went around and
around with hobbypcb about this. I got several firmware updates which put a
band-aid on the problem but never fixed it. It had talk off issues on PL. I
kind of figured it was in narrow mode but it was latter confirmed that it
was not. I currently use mine in squelch only mode locally with the squelch
set high to avoid noise keyups. You really need reliable PL or DCS on an
Allstar node. I forget if I tried DCS but I am thinking I did and it too
was not working correctly.

This falls under the category of the seller says they are being used all
over successfully as Allstar,
IRLP, Echolink nodes but I don't buy it. I spend a lot of time on this
board and never got it the way I wanted it. I was very disappointed as it
would have made a great programmable node where you could easily set the
band, frequency, PL etc. via Allstar. The programming works fine.

Maybe I got bad hardware but I find that unlikely. I have had several
others with boards confirm my findings.

I suppose you could use it with an external PL board or with usbradio if
that worked better. I have tried neither.

One other more minor thing is there is a battery charger chip on the board
that apparently has a high failure rate. Like 20% or something like that
confirmed by Hobbypcb. Apparently there was a bad run of the chips. Mine
failed right out of the box and I had to cut it out of the circuit. It was
not a big deal to me as I would never have used it. This is probably under
control now depending on how many potentially bad ones he has on the shelf.


*73 Doug*

*WA3DSP*

*http://www.crompton.com/hamradio <http://www.crompton.com/hamradio>*



On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 8:51 AM, "Jeremy Utley via arm-allstar" <
arm-allstar at hamvoip.org> wrote:

> Hey all!  Has anyone tried to use the HobbyPCB RS-UV3 shield as a node
> tranciever yet?  I just found this, and it looks intriguing.  Thinking
> about
> getting one for myself for a possible micro-node build.
>
>
>
> Jeremy, NQ0M
>
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