Ranger RCI Mobiles

[madscanner]

To anyone with experience with the modern Ranger RCI line of export citizen's band radios: are they generally considered as solid and well-built as the original RCI-2950 and RCI-2970 vintage units? Curious whether they still command any respect, given they were notorious back in the 1990s among freebanders and others who were crazy about having all the bells and whistles.

 

[WSAC829]

I’d say no. Ranger / RCI for the last 20-ish years has been known for shoddy quality circuit boards (warped), cold solder joints, and they tend to drift off frequency on SSB like crazy. The 2950’s back in the 90’s were pretty good radios, but they were also prone to crappy solder joints back then as well. I’ve had to reflow many many many Ranger chassis based radios (Ranger, RCI, Galaxy, Connex, SuperStar, etc) for friends over the years. I’d stay as far away from any of those brands unless they are at least 30 years old and still have the Uniden made chassis in them, but that's just me.

On a side note, look online, like facebook cb groups for example, and look how many pictures of these radios are off frequency out of the box. For AM/FM use it’s not a big deal, but for SSB it makes a HUGE difference and people will tell you that you are off frequency (if they can understand you to begin with). In the image below the frequency counter should show 27.1850, not 27.1854, but that’s pretty typical for RCI / Ranger based radios. Maybe that's why most of their radios only come with 5-digit frequency counters now, to hide the horror.

 

[madscanner]

Thanks for the warning! Ouch. Ironically, one of the main aspects of the very first RCI-2950/2970 units so many at the time seemed to love was the quality of their SSB audio. At least when tuned and maintained on frequency (cooling was quite necessary to facilitate that), they often garnered heaps of praise and compliments for their audio fidelity and punch. In fact, I seem to recall it being something of a consensus that the original runs of those radios sounded better on sideband than on AM itself.