USDX / USDR Transceivers - The Good, Bad and Ugly

the micro SDX or USDX or USDR or micro SDR USDR plus true SDX. Uh there's a whole family of radios here. I know we've all seen them. They're inexpensive per se for a multiband ham radio HF transceiver. And uh I've got them all, tried them all, pretty much most of them. I want to give you some history on these things, give you my experience, what I've experienced, the good, the bad, the ugly about the USDX radio family. Stick around. [Applause] [Music] The USDX or USDR or micro SDX or micro SDR, whatever you want to call it. Let's talk about how this these radios all came about. And I mean, there's a lot of them out there. This all started uh way back before uh this there was a radio and many of you are very familiar with it the QCX. The QCX is a 5 watt CW transceiver that was designed by Hans G0 upl and then produced and built by QRP Labs and uh really uh popular. I've got one this CW only 5 watt little QRP radio. Mine's for the 20 meter band. These were for just you know one band. um was real popular in a few years back um two guys and a lot of us know these guys from this world but to start this whole project off this was the project the USDX project or so what somebody would call the QCX SSB contact they wanted to take this hardware that was just CW and and turning it turn it into an SSB radio as well those two were Guido P1N zed and Manuel Well, DL2 mann and they took this thing and developed what really ended up becoming um this one was the first one I ever had the USDX or the micro SDX. Now these things you as they great job an SDR radio just genius the software behind it everything that went into it. The problem with it is as they developed this thing it started getting cloned and I mean cloned like crazy. So, you know, they backed off and ju just a couple years ago came back in with their own version, the true USDX, which is now kind of under their control and is built by licensed builders uh under their those guys. But getting back to these, we've all seen them. They're all over eBay, AliExpress, I mean, Amazon, everywhere. I'm going to give you my experience with them. This was the first one I got. I I I don't want to give too many links to these because here's the biggest thing I found out in buying these radios is it's hit or miss.