Grundig G3 review

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CLynch7

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Well, I picked up one at Radio Shack this morning. Verdict? I'm not impressed, definitely not a replacement for my G5. It isn't nearly as sensitive as the G5. Stations that are armchair copy on the G5 are barely readable on the G3. Sync worked reasonably well, when it works. Part of the problem is reduced sensitivity of the radio, and also images from local MW station 1080am, resulting in a garbled mess. When it does work, audio is much bassier, similar to the G5s audio. Regular audio treble-heavy. Radio seems to be poorly shielded, MW ghosts and images are numerous, and mix with SW stations. AM also suffers from reduced sensitivity as well, but no other issues. FM is as sensitive as the G5. RDS works well. Air band same as G6, no scan or squelch. Picked up ATIS from local airport, very faint, easy copy on a scanner. So as with the G6, Air band is more of an afterthought, had very few image issues. Overall, a 3 out of 5. I'm going to return it tomorrow. Too bad, Grundig/Eton really could have had a great radio, they could have used all the time from when it was announced and repeatedly delayed to fix the problems. Maybe version 3 will correct the issues.
 

CLynch7

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Update: Swapped radio out for a new one, but more of the same. New unit was more sensitive, but still prone to MW images. Volume better than before. S-Meter stuck on 3. Sync detector misaligned, resulting in 'Daffy Duck' voices when used. SSB and sync unreadable when attenuator not used.
 

nanZor

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Got my hands on one of these today and I'll have to agree to some extent, although my experience was a bit nicer. - especially on the airband as compared to the small G6.

For me, sync is a toy that I ignore. I haven't come across a budget receiver that does it right anyway. Even the sync in the canonical Icom R75 is being dropped.

I didn't run into the overload conditions that you experienced, and find SSB/AM generally nice to use. Audio filter for narrow is ok, but still a bit too bassy. Any receiver that has AM / FM broadcast capabilities always seems to try and make HF "high fidelity" and misses the boat.

Airband ops: ok, this isn't a scanner. :) Noticed that for airband there seems to be a fixed level of sensitivity / attenuation as the dx/local switch has no effect. The external antenna jack doesn't seem to be working on airband either. So we're stuck with the whip.

The manual mentions using the whip fully extended for airband, although I usually like to push the elements down to about 23 inches or so. In this case, I found the best sensitivity for airband was with TWO of the upper elements pushed back in. Not a bad idea since the whip is extremely fragile.

The lack of a squelch is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the receiver is MUCH quieter than the little G6, and in fact is now actually usable when sitting on a freq. There is a little bit of background noise, but there is enough audio power to let the radio sit across a desk / room and hear the aircraft comms without going nuts listening to a lot of noise in between transmissions. Not a squelch for sure, but I can actually use this thing now.

The lack of scanning capability is not a big deal, since if I want to scan I'll grab a scanner. :) In addition, the up/down arrows use a frequency spacing of 10khz from the AM broadcast band, instead of the standard 25 khz for general aviation! You can get around this by just knowing the exact freqs ahead of time, or using the VFO - which is cool for those with 8.33 khz spacing. However, for those who don't know the aircraft band, they are going to miss a LOT of the action if they rely on the radio to step through the freqs with the arrow keys.

Grundig: if you are going to promote airband capability, provide a squelch and at least use the right frequency steps. :) Maybe in a future upgrade? Scanning a page of aircraft freqs might be nice, but don't know if we'll ever see that in a typical HF portable.

Also noticed the weird signal sound when using the supplied charger. Substituted a higher-quality charger and the same bizarre sound is heard. So, for now, I'm only running off batteries and using the adapter solely to charge the batts if I have to. I don't know what's up with that.

I've also tried using just collapsing the whip a little bit instead of using the dx/local switch as an attenuator alternative and that works well sometimes too.

Overall, for $150 not bad - but I would have rather had them put the money and r/d into making a better sounding *communications* radio with tighter specs rather than promoting RDS and Sync.

At least the airband is tolerable, unlike the G6 "aviator". :)
 
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CLynch7

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Got the Universal Radio deal via an eBay seller. Not bad, pretty close in performance to the G5. Missing the QC sticker, and radio appears to have been opened. I'm guessing it is a refurb or at least bench tested and aligned at UR.
 
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