quite there when compared to an all-in-one cartridge but that is to be expected the idea is that you can have a very wide selection of tips for quite a low investment by using this separate heater and tip cartridge however as we found if you do want the maximum performance you can still buy these cartridges which is a really nice point because we have the option of either going for a lower cost setting set up with lots of different tips at a low price or we can go for the high performance and just get a bunch of these cartridges and we'll know that we'll be able to deliver some of the highest power into our soldering joints um the other uh possible um critique that i do have about this station partly exacerbated at the moment by the parts shortage and everything that's going on but there are obviously fewer cartridges available at the moment and that's also partly due to the fact that this is still quite a new soldering station but when you look at the cartridges available for the mx station or even some of the competitors like the jbc cNUMBER_TOKENs there's absolutely masses of cartridges available for those and there's still quite a limited range of these at the moment and some of these are quite difficult to get hold of but i think if we were able to get more of the specialist types so the ones more suited to specific smd tasks then that would really put this as a competitor against some of the other soldering stations out there so anyway let's have a look inside the unit and see what the differences actually are so just before we take it apart i thought we'd just look at the manufacture date so this is obviously the newer version this is the one that i originally did the review on and actually this is only just after the release date for the gt-NUMBER_TOKEN so from what i can find it was actually announced on the NUMBER_TOKENth of may NUMBER_TOKEN so we got this one just after the announcement that they were bringing out this new product line and so it's possible that this one was more intended for marketing and that kind of thing this is obviously the newer version but other than um the manufacture date and the serial number there's no indication that there's a new pcb or anything like that inside so that's the bottom cover off and interestingly there is no warranty sticker on either of these on all of the rf stations even the psNUMBER_TOKEN there's a little sticker that gets broken if you try and take off the lid i'm not sure the rationale behind that and why they haven't put one on one of these and anyway you can see that there is definitely a difference in the pcbs because there is a capacitor here on the old version that now no longer exists on the newer pcb and also a quick correction to my previous video these inductors are actually part of the rf heating i wasn't sure whether it was an rf or a plane resistive heater in my first video but it obviously is an induction heater and in fact there are plenty of patterns that you can read you can go on google patterns and search for oki metcal and you'll find all the patterns including the one about this device that goes into quite a bit of detail about how it works you might need to use the translate option because it's done in chinese but they've
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