From: wejones@crdec7.apgea.army.mil (Bill Jones)
Newsgroups: rec.radio.amateur.misc
Subject: Alinco 599 comments
Date: 9 Oct 1992 10:59:40 -0700
Organization: UCSD Usenet Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: ucsd.edu

     I have owned an Alinco DR599 for about 7 months now, and
thought I should make a few comments on its operation.  Feature
wise, as I think obvious from the ads, the radio is very nice, it
can do everything I have interest in doing, and the removable
front panel is nice for those like myself who don't have room
under the dash for a full sized unit.  As far as operation is
concerned, I have received good reports relative to the quality
of my signals even at sizeable distances.  The receiver gives
fairly good quality sound, better than the Radio Shack HTX202
and better than any of the scanners I own, but not as good as a
Yaesu 736, but that is to be expected. The problems I have
observed are:
 
1.  The unit seems to be susceptable to front end overload on
receive.  If I park near another ham who is transmitting to a
repeater, I cannot listen to his side of the conversation at all,
whereas he has no problem with his 202 when I am transmitting.  I
guess that this is to be expected also, since single banded
tranceivers without extended receive generally have better filtering.
2.  Possibly related to the above, the unit seems susceptable to
receiving strong out of band signals, like pagers, etc.
3.  I use the unit for packet, and it works well, except it seems
to take a bit longer to sync up both on transmit and receive, so
that I had to increase the time interval prior to start sending
data, and have had minor problems with some stations that have
not increased this parameter.
4.  The unit seems very sensitive to low power.  I commonly
operate off a cigarette lighter power cord "Y", and the extra
resistance will not let me transmit (can hit repeaters, but audio
is too garbled for people to understand me) at high power if I
turn off the engine of the car.  Working off a 12 volt
battery with a solid connection works fine, as does dropping 
back to low or mid power (I had accidently bumped the unit into high
power when I discovered this problem).  Apparently there is
a voltage threshold near 12 volts below which the unit doesn't
work well, and the extra voltage from the alternator keeps me
above this threshold even with the poor connections.
 5.  The strangest problem I have run into is when I recently
tried to connect an extension speaker to the 2-meter speaker
jack.  At first, this seemed to work well, since 2-meter now came
out at the front of the car while 440 came out of the rear, where
the the main unit was.  This avoided confusion I had previously
run into over which band I was hearing.  The problem began when
the audio started suffering from feedback oscillation and
microphonic sensitivity to vibration on the 440 side.  Vibration,
or strong signals would set the thing into a loud hum.  I tried
to switch the extension speaker to the 440 side to see if the 2-
meter side would oscillate, but when I did this, both 2-meter and
440 came out of the speaker, but not both at the same time, ie if
I would be listening to one band, and the other band broke
squelch, it would turn off the first (forget which had
presidence).  I could not get it into a mode with 440 coming out
of the extension speaker and 2-meter out the base unit.  When I
bought a second extension speaker, everything worked OK, ie one
band out of each speaker, and no oscillation out of either band.
Very strange.
 
Overall, even with the strange behavior, I would still buy the
599, it is basically a nice unit.  I would be curious whether
other 599 owners have observed the same problems.
 
Newsgroups: rec.radio.amateur.misc