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Reviews For: Xiegu G106

Category: Transceivers: HF Amateur HF+6M+VHF+UHF models - non QRP <5W

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Review Summary For : Xiegu G106
Reviews: 7MSRP: 379 Euro
Description:
The G106 is a 5W QRP model with SDR circuit structure which uses a 16-bit CODEC sampling and deliver superior performance. The whole machine has SSB/CW/AM three modes and extra WFM (88-108MHz) receiving function allowing you to listen to local FM broadcast while communicating. Equipped with a CW digital filter with three bandwidths it can help you connect to more and farther stations. With the external DE-19 digital adapter (optional) it can easily be connected to the computer for complete FT* communication. (Extracted from manufacturers brochure)
Product is in production
More Info: https://pileupdx.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
2573.9
W5APL Rating: 2024-11-26
Great little Radio for the money Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
The Xiegu G106 is not that bad. What do you want for $297 to $319. With the last two firmware updates from Xiegu the little guy is almost a real ham radio. I have 2 of the G106. One for the shack which is only a small room and the other for my small to-go-box to take to the park. I use it with my old MP-1 antenna and a LDG Z817 tuner. I'm only on 10 meters and when things go right with MR. SUN i 'm able to work 10 meters fine. Great little radio for the money. Sometimes a simple rig is fun to use.

11-25-24
Update on the G106. Now i have 2 to use. AMAZON has them for $199 for a short time. Still a good radio. Fun to use and easily to set up.
WA6MOW Rating: 2024-08-13
A fun radio for $235.00 Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I love ham gear. Its a serious disease. I bought this radio when I saw the price , $235.00. I always buy used gear but stepped out of the box on this one and got wild and crazy. The build quality is solid(better than my KX2) and should hold up well in the field. The internal speaker is small but adequate. I use ear buds most of the time. This is very basic radio lacking the features of a more expensive rig but it does get the job done. I have only used it on cw. It has cw filtering, 50hz, 250hz, and 500hz. It has a pre amp when needed. The cw keyer works good. The display is large and easy to read. The scope works. Compared to the various USdx rigs, this is much superior in every way. If you are looking for a radio to play in the dirt with, this is a good choice. Taking a $1200 to $1500 QRP rig on the beach is very stressful. I love my KX2 and Icom 705 rigs, but for a beater rig, the G106 will get you on the air and give you the experience of trying to make contacts with QRP. You may find that QRP is brutal and not for you. Its easy to resell cheap radios!
KG9H Rating: 2024-06-26
Great for the money Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Well never drilled a hole in a radio that was 2 days old but I did it. Audio now on transmit is pretty good. Receiver is acceptable for my use. I like the CW filters. All bands are over 6 watts out. Time will tell but I will continue to use this radio as a "Test Radio" on my bench till I get a 20 meter dipole that I can carry with me. CW "extra dit" went away after I upgraded firmware to the latest.
KT8DX Rating: 2024-02-08
A delightful radio Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I have been a ham since 1975 and have owned everything from an HW-8 to a FLEX-6400. I find this little G106 to be delightful to use and I use it a lot for CW. Its simple but a lot more complex than many radios I've used over the years. Try CW on a Tempo One - now THAT is primitive! Anyhow it works well and is simple. With my straight key I can spend hours just ragchewing to my hearts content.
W7TSM Rating: 2023-12-08
What do you people want for $250? Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Page one of the G106 manual says "As an entry-level portable SDR transceiver, G106 will be a good helper for you to play CW and Ft8." Not much else to be said about where Xiegu expects this machine to sit in the market. It's just not a great position in my opinion.

The problem with this radio is how the design team and engineers put it together. The overall design of the case and physical interface is lazy. They straight up ripped off Elad on the knob design. Why does it have an FM radio? Your market doesn't want an FM radio Xiegu! Waste of code and man hours. The lack of a built in sound card is also a huge mistake.

The overall issue with this radio is where it sits on the market and how it stacks up to the competition. Dollar for dollar there just really isnt any reason to buy this radio. It's not a bad radio, its just not a good radio. Take the same idea, get rid of the CW relays that are going to break eventually. Put in standard SDR features like SSB filters, and noise reduction. Create a military/rugged case design similar to say an FT817 with a waterfall and the thing would dominate. Get creative with ideas and stop ripping off Icom (looking at you 6100) and other companies designs.
W8IJN Rating: 2023-04-06
You too can be a beta tester . . . again Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Seriously, I tried to like this radio. I really did. I had a handful of CW and SSB QSOs with it. I never could get it to work with FT8. Once again, I was a beta tester for Xiegu.

My take on the G106 is as simple as the radio: It's a gut-bucket, no frills, basic radio lacking many of the more common features in cheaper Chinese clones. In many ways it's the same radio I had back five decades ago but smaller and with solid state components.

Here's a list of things you don't get:
1. No SWR or output metering (and no ALC metering)
2. No RIT
3. No RF gain (though there is a preamp)
4. No control over sidetone volume (but a sidetone frequency adjustment)
5. No SSB filter selections (though you get three CW filter variables)
6. No noise filter/blanker
. . . Note that items 1 through 4 are part of the Chinese/eBay uSDX radios at about half the cost.

What you do get is a list of things that are common to many radios:
1. A semblance of control over mic gain
2. Split operations with two VFOs
3. Separate mode & filter settings for digital SSB modes
4. Channel memories for frequency & mode (50, 0-49)
5. Built in keyer with choice of iambic modes (but no keyer message memories)

And it has an FM broadcast receive function. Why? Because Baofeng maybe?

Beyond that, it's just a radio. It comes in a nicely decorated box. You get a speaker/microphone, a minimalist power cable, a standard Xiegu programming cable and a basic English language operation manual. The manual gives just enough info to get you through setting it up and getting some grasp of how the buttons and memories work.

The receive audio quality is ok. Running the AF gain higher also raises the level of the CW sidetone, which is plenty loud enough & raspy in headphones, leading to ear fatigue. So you end up using the preamp to balance that level. There is no headphone jack. Headphones hook up through the speaker mic. Putting the receive audio through an external speaker does help. Otherwise it's as tinny as a 1950s transistor radio.
. . . The transmit audio on SSB with the provided mic is good enough for basic communications. It's somewhat muffled and sounds restricted in bandwidth. The signal lacks definite high frequency components that tend to aid in a weak signal cutting through the noise. I had to modify an extra mic from the (tr)uSDX kit to get a decent SSB signal out to match the sound of the IC-705.
. . . On CW, it's obvious that Xiegu still hasn't figured that out. The sidetone is jagged and has a very high pitched, digital, squeaky component. The side tone itself is annoying and jarring. If this is what's being fed to the transmitter output, it is not exactly a pure note. On more than one example of this radio as reviewed by others, multiple CW carriers have been seen and heard either side of the RF output.

Digital requires the purchase of the accessory DE-19, which comes with a cable for connecting the DE-19 to the radio and a USB cable that connects between computer and DE-19.
. . . I only got the DE-19 to work FT8 once and that was on receive only. The instructions require you download and install a CH342 driver. My virus/malware protection flagged it as dangerous, so I scrubbed it from the computer. After that I managed to get the DE-19 to connect to the radio but on transmit all I got was a transmitted wash of noise across about 2.5kHz of space. I discovered that the mic gain control causes that problem, even though the radio is supposedly in a digital mode setting. At which point I gave up on digital.

As far as putting out a signal, it will do that. The radio I got puts out nearly 7W CW on 75/80m and about 5W on all other bands but 30m. On 30m I get about 3W. This is because the LPF circuitry press gangs the output into four basic batches. One LPF takes care of 75/80m & 60m, another covers 40m and 30m, a third does 20m & 17m, and the last works 15m, 12m and 10m. That's obvious from the four sets of three coils in the output filter & the sound of the band switch relays moving through the bands. It will receive 160m but not transmit there. So it transmits.

Why there is a FM broadcast receive function is beyond my comprehension. It's a waste of firmware & operating modes right out of the Baofeng book. That chunk of code could have gone to having RIT at the very least.

And, of course, you get no schematics. State secret, comrade. Why you ask?

At heart the Xiegu G106 is a shabby version of many Chinese clones of the DL2MAN/PE1NNZ (tr)uSDX radio but with 9-band HF band coverage. But even the (tr)uSDX radio and its Chinese clones have RIT and an SWR meter. And many of the uSDX radios cost about half the G106 price.
. . . The G106 might have somewhat better receive audio than the clones and special settings for filters for digital modes but that's about it. You'll never get those functions to work anyway, so it's not worth it. The G106 barely passes as a low rent/low expectations radio for a POTA/SOTA kit.

As always with Xiegu, the buyer is a beta tester for a company that should know how to make a radio that doesn't leave the buyer waiting for the next firmware update. It won't take too long before you are less than thrilled by the radio's shortcomings. You deserve something plainly better. And there definitely is better. Save your money.

So, yeah, one star for what parts of the radio were a radio. After that, zero stars.
5B4AIY Rating: 2022-12-23
Not bad for the price Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
To be honest, it's not that I needed another transceiver, it was bought on a whim, having seen it on sale for 299 Euro at PileupDX.

The first step was to update the firmware to the latest version. As received, it was still using version 1.0, 22/July/2022. The latest version is revision 1.2, 20/September/2022. The Xiegu notes detailing this omit one very important step - setting the speed! The default setting of 9,600 Baud has to be changed to 115,000 Baud. Once this has been done, then the firmware update proceeds as shown in the notes. Note, there does not seem to be any method of altering the speed of the serial COM port, and furthermore, the interface is 3.3V TTL rather than standard RS-232, so you MUST use the accessory cable, not a normal USB-RS232 cable wired to a 3.5mm plug.

After that, I put it through its paces.

Power Consumption
Since this transceiver is probably intended for portable operation, it would be important to keep the power consumption low. In receive, it draws 290mA with the pre-amp off, and 330mA with the pre-amp on. For comparison, my Lab599 Discovery transceiver draws 100mA, my Elecraft KX3 240mA, and my Elad FDM-Duo 470mA.

Transmit
The power O/P in transmit depends upon the supply voltage.
On 20m, CW
14.2V 13.8V 12.6V 12.0V 11.1V 10.0V
6.5W 6.1W 5.1W 4.8W 4.0W 2.6W
1.33A 1.30A 1.25A 1.20A 1.16A 0.98A

Power Output/Band / 13.8V
10M 12M 15M 17M 20M 30M 40M 60M 80M
5.7W 7.7W 7.0W 6.0W 6.1W 4.6W 5.1W 5.6W 7.0W

In SSB, the idle power consumption with zero modulation is 650mA.

Receiver
This is not the most sensitive receiver. I measured mine, and the Minimum Detectable Signal in the SSB mode is -115dBm/0.4uV with the pre-amp on, and -97dBm/3uV with the preamp off. Whilst its sensitivity is adequate, you almost always have to have the preamplifier engaged. There is no attenuator. In the CW mode the bandwidth is adjustable from 50Hz to 500Hz, but there is no equivalent adjustment for SSB, it is fixed at about 2.4kHz. One positive factor, unlike some of Xiegu's other radios, this one is commendably free of spurious signals. Such few as are evident are below atmospheric noise and can only be heard when a screened dummy load is connected, and even then, only with the preamplifier on. There are some loud tuning glitches.

This is a Type-1 SDR, (Direct Conversion), and as the spectrum display is separate, there are 'Ghost' signals visible. If there are any strong signals exactly +/- 12kHz from the tuning point, then they will appear twice on the display, either side. The spectrum display span is +/- 24kHz, and again, if there are strong signals exactly +/- 24kHz from the tuning point they too will be visible on both sides of the display.

There is a fair amount of local oscillator radiation in receive. The LO signal exiting from the antenna socket is -48.7dBm with the preamplifier off, and -74.2dBm with it on.

Tuning Glitches
5.305/6, 7.073/4, 7.215/6, 21.220/1
Spurii
S1 noise: 1.828
Weak spurii: 21.025, 21.504, 29.449

And Now For The Bad Points
1. The main tuning knob increments in discrete steps, and in my case often misses a step, which makes tuning and adjustments somewhat hit and miss.

2. There is no SWR meter.

3. There is no VOX capability.

4. There is no way to adjust the output power.

5. There is no headphone output other than on the microphone, and even this is only to one earpiece (Left) of a stereo headset, nor is there an external speaker jack.

6. The audio from both the internal speaker and the headphone socket is lacking in treble, and somewhat muffled.

7. Unless you are prepared to purchase the DE-19 interface box, there is almost no way for you to use a digital mode such as FT-8. If you make yourself a patch box using a 4-pin telephone connector to plug into the microphone socket as well as some way of triggering the PTT line then it would be possible, but by itself the radio is incapable of digital mode operation. The PTT line at the microphone socket is 3.3V when in receive, and when grounded supplies 400uA, thus only either an open-collector or open-drain transistor or a dry relay contact is suitable.

8. When pressing the PTT switch in SSB, there is a momentary full O/P RF power spike. This makes operation with a linear amplifier somewhat problematic, especially as the O/P power cannot be changed, other than by reducing the microphone gain for SSB. There is no adjustment for CW. The nominal 5W O/P is too much for my DIY599-PA500 linear and can only just be accommodated with my Juma PA-100D with full I/P attenuation. As there is no keyline O/P, you would have to make yourself an RF sense feed through box to derive a keyline signal to put a linear into transmit, unless you have a linear that is already so equipped. In this regard, perhaps the initial spike might be useful in initiating a transmit signal. A bug is only a bug until you find a use for it, then it becomes a feature! Nevertheless, deriving a key-line signal from the RF would involve hot-switching the linear into transmit which might be risky.

9. The AGC is always on, and there is no means to adjust its time-constant. However, its default setting seems reasonable for both SSB and CW.

10. There is no split capability.

So, what exactly do you get for 300 Euro? You get a minimal 5W SDR transceiver, with a receiver that whilst not the most sensitive is adequate, and commendably free from spurii. However, it is subject to 'Ghost' signals on the panadaptor. It lacks many of the common amenities of other radios, SWR meter, VOX, adjustable bandwidth, adjustable O/P power, headphone socket, etc, and without the DE-19 accessory unit is incapable of digital mode operation. The transmitter is reasonably clean but emits a full-power spike when going into transmit on SSB.

Overall, not bad considering the price, and possibly a good 'starter' radio without too many complexities. I suspect, though, that it would not be very long before you would be frustrated by the compromises of this radio and would want something more capable.

Adrian, 5B4AIY

ADDENDUM 23-December-2022
1. My apologies', SPLIT mode IS available - it simply goes by the rather odd title of 'Pilot Frequency Mode' on page 4/5 under the button marked SPL. As with other transceivers VFO-A is used for RX, and VFO-B for TX. Be aware that this transceiver can operate split bands as well as split frequency on the same band!

2. In discussions with PileUP-DX, Xiegu have stated that neither SWR nor VOX can be made available due to hardware limitations.

3. The very latest firmware, version 1.2b03 dated 10-October-2022 now adds the ability to alter the O/P power in 3 stages, LOW-MID-HIGH

4. The full O/P spike will be addressed in a future update.

5. The somewhat poor RX frequency response will also be addressed.

So, things are looking up for this interesting little rig!
73, Adrian, 5B4AIY