QRPGUYS EFHW
It's outrageous how Chinese manufacturers get away with all this theft, but then again, it's because people (me included) enable them.
When the copied product is something simple like this antenna, the buyer isn't even risking anything because I dare say there'll be barely any difference between the original and this fake - or is there???
The genuine No Tune End Fed Half Wave came to me as a kit and it looks like this....
You can see straight away that the original uses what appears to be a better quality toroid and the wiring of the toroid is different too! The genuine one has three primary turns of twisted wire, where the copy only has one properly twisted loop.
So in real terms, what does that mean? Well for each of the antennas I made up, I cut a length of wire to make it resonant on the required band using my RigExpert, so despite any differences in the wiring of the toroids, the end result is a resonant antenna. I might (for the hell of it) replace the toroids and wire them as per the original.
Some people warn that the quality of the copy-pcb may not be as good as the original but I don’t think it’s going to be any different at all - probably made at the same factory, knowing how the Chinese operate. Someone also suggested that the plastic-bodied BNC connector is not as good as a metal-bodied one, but the original unit has the same plastic BNC and I’m sure it’s absolutely fine at QRP power levels.
Anyway, all that aside, these super compact antennas are so cheap (£3) that I have a few of them. I'd be happy to pay £3 just for the pcb and hardware! Instead of buying one and changing the wire to suit the band I wish to work on, I simply fit the appropriate wire and wrap it around the pcb in a figure-of-eight to avoid tangling.
I have a 10M, a 20M and a 40M, ready to go. No tuner required. Super quick and easy to deploy out in the field.
You might ask why I don't just use the one antenna and carry three different lengths of wire. Well that's because I'd have to carry one antenna and three wire-winders. I prefer the former.
DO YOU knowingly buy copies?? Let me know.
73, Tom, M7MCQ.
2 comments:
Hello Tom, if it is that cheap I would not trust it. And probabely not buy this from China. Well Tom I've also bought an original QRPguys product 5 years ago. It was a digital field strength meter kit. It was really not an easy kit and it contained a fault as well. In the end I got it working, not because of the (bad) support. But in the end it was just my logic thinking. See my blogpost: https://pe4bas.blogspot.com/2019/10/qrpguys-digital-fieldstrength-meter.html.
A solution to the above was written in the same month.
Just the moral of the story. Even the original could be bad and the copy could be good. You proved that in this case both are working well.
73, Bas
Sometimes one may purchase an item not knowing it's a copy. Also, shipping costs can be insane to ship from the USA to the UK, but super cheap from China. I just bought some antenna bits and Shipping was $60 on $100 worth of stuff that's not that heavy to ship to Canada.
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