Vertex VX-160 radio, awful receiver. What gives?

[ElroyJetson]

I generally don't do much with Vertex radios but every now and then, some customer sends in a bunch of Vertex radios for checkout, that they got conned into buying. My experiences with Vertex radios so far
have not been very positive. Their repeaters are OK but their portable radios...not so much.

What I'm seeing here on the test bench is a problem with several radios, all VX-160s. They have very poor receiver sensitivity and the audio is weak and distorted. Also, when you drop the signal strength of a test
signal going into the radio, the modulated audio gets weak long before the receiver starts to get noisy.

When I say very poor receiver sensitivity, I'm used to most radios getting about 12 dB SINAD at a -120 dBM input signal. I'm seeing some VX-160s that miss this spec by a full 50 dB. That's insanely bad.


I'm seeing this on a number of radios.

What's going on here and is it a problem that can be fixed by giving the radio and alignment?

 

[kb0nly]

Take them apart and check the antenna connector. I had a few VX160's come through a while back that a guy gave me to look at, very similar to your description he said they had weak receive. Took them apart and two of them had broken solder joints on the antenna jack, the third the center pin was cracked.

I asked him if people are picking them up by the antenna, he mentioned they always pull them out of the holster by the antenna, theres your problem i said, putting too much stress on the antenna connector.

I had one here for a few months on loan, never had a problem with it, and the receiver was just as good as my FT60R in a head to head comparison. Though the stock antenna kinda sucks on them also, a replacement antenna made a big difference also.

I haven't had any major troubles with Vertex, and own a pile of Yaesu gear with no complaints.

 

[Luis_R]

Have you tried injecting your signal down the RF path thru the low pass filters, antenna switch, and band pass filters ( could be 1 of the coils, caps, diodes, etc..) while checking to see if your RX sense gets better. Most common problem I've found are the 2nd IF ceramic filters CF1001 (for narrow), CF1002 (wide), and XF1002 xtal filter. Also you may want to check Q1037, just some thoughts on what I've encountered with the same issue you're having.

 

[W2NJS]

Vertex portables, properly tuned and set up, are fine radios. My previous and last employer, before I retired for good, uses Vertex UHF 180s (LCD version of the 160) as the sideline comms radio with about ten units running at the Redskins home games. I had a hand in the selection of the radios and they've never given even a moment's trouble since starting into service about three years ago. I don't think it's at all fair to write a general indictment of a manufacturer's product because one has come upon a bunch of HTs that underperform, especially before investigating the possible causes of the problems. I own and use Motorola, Icom, and Vertex HTs and when they misbehave or otherwise "act up" I just fix whatever's wrong and keep using them.

 

[kayn1n32008]

Well my company has a bunch of different radios, vx-180, vx-231, cp200, p110, p1225, gp300, array of
bubble-crap frs/gmrs. byfar the Vertex radios are the best that the company has, I just went through a box of junk and told our tech guy to recycle the p110, and p1125 as they are 2ch and beat up. Over time our company is going to replace the moto-crap with vertex handhelds.

This photo was taken at the end of a 10 hour work day, it was somewhere between -20C to -25. This was a usual sight for the better part of 2 months

 

[ElroyJetson]

Lately a LOT of Vertex radios have come in with similar receive problems. Solder and connector issues have not been a significant contributor to the cause.

I think they're having some of the same issues with the ceramic bandpass filters that Icom has been having lately, except that attempts to repair by replacing said filters didn't alter the symptom.

I have to be really honest here and tell you that so far I am anything but impressed by Vertex radios.
I'm seeing way too many failures out of the total number of radios I've seen.


Elroy

 

[kb0nly]

Odd, haven't seen any failure like your talking about here and i know two dealers that sell a couple dozen Vertex units per week on average.