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Alinco DJX-30E
After reviewing the Alinco DJX-7 some months ago I noticed
that Alinco had bought out yet another model in the form of the Alinco DJX-30. Alinco DJ-X30 Compact Handheld Scanner A new High performance scanning receiver that also receives short wave signals and more. The Alinco DJX30 will receive from 100KHz to 1.3Ghz covering just about all
you need from aircraft or business Small in size but big in features, this pocket size receiver offers a selectable
keyboard system with an optional remote control cable with Pre-set bands make operation easy AM/FM and TV audio bands have been pre-set to make it easy to enjoy the DJ-X30 right from the start. Features : Optional Accessories : Specifications : Receiver : Right with all the technical jargon (That makes no sense to me I hope it does to you) My thanks must go to Nevada communications once again for loaning me this unit for review purposes. lets get on with the review. 1000 channels 100 KHz - 1.3 Ghz 5 scan modes analog inversion descrambler? This all smacks of the DJX-7! So what's the difference? Well first of all although I know the credit card sized djx-7 was built for stealth, for me it was a pain because it just could not stand up on its own due to the slimness of the casing. Yes it fits lovely in a shirt pocket but there were times when I wanted to stand it on a desktop and had to first find something suitable to prop it up.
Aesthetically I found the Alinco very pleasing, a nice size too. The top half of the front of the unit being made up of a very adequately sized lcd display below this we have 3 functional buttons and to the right of these the rest of the mid section is made up of the speaker grill of which I am not 100 per cent sold on as the gaps in the grill are too wide for my liking giving the speaker far too much exposure to the elements. Below this we have the optional keypad. Optional? Yes this is secured by 4 philips screws of which you can undo and replace the keypad with a separate fascia with a map of the world on it!!! Why? God only knows! removing the keypad greatly restricts the actions you can perform with this scanner and why anyone would want it fitted is beyond me! On the left side (As you look at it)we have 3 side buttons the top one doubling up as a Function/keypad lock button. Below this a monitor button and below this is the power on/off button. At the bottom of the unit we have a battery compartment clip. (The djx-30 can be powered by cells or an optional battery pack) As is becoming more and more common in modern scanners these days the top of the unit has a rotary knob that doubles as a channel/frequency selector as well as for performing several functions in conjunction with the Function button. and next to this we have an ear socket for use with earphones. Like the Uniden 3500xlt the DJX-30 has different band plans for use in different parts of the world. These can be changed to a band plan that suits your part of the world. I left the review set to the out of the box band plan 1 that appears to suit use in the UK. Step sizes The Alinco I am pleased to say comes with an abundance of frequency step sizes which should cater for all including 8.33KHz for civil air and 6.25khz which is used in the UK sometimes on UHF and VHF. What I found very nice here is that the DJX-30 actually resolves 6.25KHz correctly. As an example tuning to a pmr 446 frequency in 6.25KHz on some scanners the Uniden's being one such culprit, the frequency is displayed at 446.0062 Now I always thought this was nothing to worry about and in practice it isn't I will still receive the correct frequency of 446.00625. However I like to know I am smack on frequency and I thought this one missing digit meant nothing but it turns out the scanner will be slightly off frequency but like I say it wont interfere with your listening. But for perfectionists like me I was pleased to see the DJX-30 resolved it correctly at 446.00625. The small stature of the scanner is somewhat compromised by a very long slim whip antenna. Again SMA has been chosen as the antenna connection over BNC. This seems to be becoming more and more common these days.There is also an internal ferrite antenna built into this scanner for shortwave reception. For discreteness and ease of portability you can even use the earphone lead as an antenna! I usually discard the antennas that come supplied with scanners for review purposes but after fitting my usual telescopic which usually does a much better job it became apparent that the supplied antenna was very very good right across a wide frequency spectrum. Very good across 70-400 Plus Mhz Okay there maybe a few glitches somewhere across the spectrum but as a wide band antenna it is very good. Trying to program this without the manual I failed dismally and had to refer to the manual which for me explained most things rather well. My only complaint here was falling into a trap that some features can be added to an already stored channel but some such as ctcss settings have to be done in vfo mode and then overwrite the channel. Setting a vfo search across the bands I found the Alinco a very good receiver. Being a sensitive unit across the bands very good on 70 mhz Fire, VHF PMR, 400 Plus mhz pmr very good however, I noticed a slight lack of sensitivity on civil air not quite hitting the tower side of the comm's where some scanners just about bring them in. This was the case with both the supplied whip and the telescopic.
Descrambler The DJX-30 like the DJX-7 and djx-2K comes with a built in descrambler for decoding simple inversion type encryption. With 29 settings available you should be able to nail your intended target. I tried it on a PMR446 set,I got my wife to transmit to me on the DJX-30 which came through totally unintelligible and quickly scrolling through the descrambler settings she was soon coming through loud and clear! I dare not say what she was calling me over the radio though! My main gripe here with the descrambler is that you can't set a scrambler setting and a ctcss tone together it's one or the other. One VHF channel that is used in my vicinity suffers from computer interference in my shack and all I get is continuous hash until someone transmits. If the ctcss tone was implemented this problem would be non existent. The Alinco comes with a couple of strange features such as scan speed. According to the manual you can adjust the speed of the scan, the reason being if you set it to the fast speed the scanner will miss lower powered or distant signals but set it to a slower speed and it wont miss anything....OK then why did they not set it at a compromise speed and leave it at that? To be honest though I played with these settings and I could not tell the difference in speed or it skipping weak signals. Then we have the next strange feature. You can select different audio quality settings such as high or low. Errm! Why? It's obvious to me that every sane person is going to set the audio quality to high so why not send it from the factory with audio set to high and be done with it? I have since found out that this may be something to do with short wave listening where a lower quality audio is more desirable. The Alinco takes either an optional battery pack or can be powered from two cells. As I did not have a battery pack to hand I opted for the cell option and inserted two AA 2500MAh Ni-Mh batteries into the battery compartment which is secure by a clip. I had a look in the box as I could not see where the charger was and soon realised that Alinco don't supply one. "Oh Well, Bummer" I thought. I looked at the dc socket on the side of the unit and quickly established it was 6v and centre positive polarity the same settings as my Uniden's PSU. So I powered it from that. I had problems at first getting the Alinco to charge until I read the manual and realised I had to set up the scanner to allow charging. This is apparently to stop you charging alkaline's and blowing up the scanner! Basically another un necessary functions that is not needed. The display when the unit is switched off gives a nice little countdown timer showing how long is left before charge is complete from 12 hours downwards. Brilliant I thought but then my excitement quickly dwindled after I powered the set up during a charge for a few minutes and turned off again and realised the countdown had started again from 12 hours. This meaning that there was no gizmo inside the scanner measuring the voltage of the batteries it was merely a timer. When I saw it was only powered from 2 cells I did wonder How long the batteries would last unfortunately the only cells I had spare were ones that had not been used for about 6 months and so were probably well past their sell by date as they died after a couple of hours use. Slipping in some alkalines and the batteries did not last as long as I would have liked. . Due to other commitments I was not able to give an accurate account of the battery life. However, The Alinco comes with the obilgatery battery saver circuit. Full marks for giving the battery pack/cells option. An annoying feature with this scanner is if you allow the batteries to completely discharge during scanning then the display will just keep flickering on and off during it's final death throes. This I found annoying and you can do nothing but wait for the batteries to completely discharge before it finally dies a death. 1000 memories will be more than adequate for a lot of people, with a nice banking system for storing differing types of frequencies these banks can be scanned together or on their own depending on your listening interest on any given day Turning on the unit and programming some frequencies into memory and looking at the display it is quite pleasing to see a decent size display displaying a wealth of information such as Channel and bank number, alpha tag (More on that later) Frequency, (If you have an alpha tag set for a channel the frequency will be displayed now in the top right hand corner which is a very nice touch and would like to have seen something like this implemented in the newer Uniden hand held's) CTCSS, (Unfortunately the actual tone is not displayed instead on a busy "TSQ" displayed) Mode, Battery saver icon, and audio quality setting. As mentioned previously there are 5 separate scan speeds and I must mention here that the scan speed at any setting is a great improvement over the Alinco djx-7 I reviewed a few short months ago. It's not really fast but a great improvement over the sloth DJX-7 Backlight Just like the DJ-X7 the backlight is a very poor effort with a very weak green colour I'm sure it is a bit better however than my memories of the DJX-7 and I am glad to say the keypad is illuminated as well as the display for ease of night time use. I found for night time use you either have to look straight on at the display or from an above angle, if you tilt the scanner back then all you will see is a blank illuminated screen Scanning The alinco comes with 5 scan settings. Preset scan In a nutshell it's not a scan it's a search VFO Scan As above! Programmed Scan As above but usually called a Limit scan or search range, where you define two frequency ranges to search between to look for active frequencies. not really scans as we know them but searches. Tone scan Again not a scan but a search for active ctcss tones Memory scan Memory scan will scan memory banks you have assigned to be scanned. You can have it scan a bank a few banks or all banks of memories. You can also lockout any channels in memory so they are not scanned again until you unlock them. There is a priority feature but I rarely ever use that as it interrupts signals as it samples for activity on prioritised channels. I also did not dabble with this feature on the DJX-7 as it looks a very similar to the set up on the Icom IC-R5 in other words useless. Come to think of it this scanner has a lot in common with the Icom-R5 in the way the programming works. So from the above we can see there are not really 5 scan settings but one! Audio I found that the DJX-30 had that same audio hiss that I did not like on the Flagship Alinco djx-2000. Don't read too much into this as apparently I was the only person in the world that had an issue with it and everyone else was happy with the audio on the DJX-2K. However cranking the volume up and the audio does struggle and becomes slightly distorted but not to an extent where I would complain.The volume goes from 0-30 It must be said however when receiving a weak signal the soft audio results in a nicer to the ear reception whereas a crisper audio gives off nasty crackles as signals break up, this just does not happen on the Alinco so maybe I should not be so quick to criticize after all. At maximum volume audio is just good enough to be heard over the road noise whilst travelling the motorway at 70 mph. Also I must say the AM reception on the 70MHz fire is extremely pleasant to the ear. Alpha tags I would really liked to have seen the capability for more than six alpha texts on this scanner 6 really is not enough. If Alinco had made the text smaller it would not have been a problem. Also I will advise when using alpha tags to use uppercase letters as lowercase ones are very awkward looking things. As you can see in the display photo below using an uppercase "F" and lower case "ire" the "i" is merely not much more than a small dot the "r" is miniscule and the "e" is enormous by comparison making for some awkward looking alpha tags. As mentioned before when using alpha tags the frequency is then displayed in the top right corner of the display. This goes a great way to redeem the Alinco of it's abysmal alpha tagging capabilities and a feature I would like in other scanners.
CTCSS The DJX-30 comes equipped with ctcss decoding capabilities you can sit on a channel and set it to search for active tones. This is quite a slow process but not the slowest I have come across by any means and really I should not say that it is slow, more the normal speed we have come to expect from most scanners except a few that really excel in this dept. Once a tone is found the DJX-30 gives of a nice audio alert. From here the frequency and found tone can be stored into memory. Unfortunately there is no provision for DCS decoding which for me is a bit of a let down. The DJX-7 never had it either and I was hoping this would have been rectified in this model there are many more radio users using dcs these days and for me this is most important. Looking on the bright side the AOR8200 is more than double the price of this scanner and does not even have ctcss capability unless you buy an expensive add on slot card. Also the alinco has a reverse ctcss fuction where you can set a ctcss tone not to be received. This can be quite handy, in my location there is an illegal user on pmr 446 using extremely high power with some sort of voice alarm using tone 69.3Hz this can be set on the Alinco so I no longer hear him. The new Unidens come with this feature too. A very nice touch well done to Alinco for implementing this.
Optional remote control You can buy an optional remote control for this scanner. I'm not sure how this works but I have always fancied a remote control for a scanner as long as there are no cables between the remote and the scanner. Software Using the optional EDS-12 cable, you can remotely control many basic functions on the DJ-X30 such as mode, band, and scan start/stop. You can also connect a portable media player to the AUX-input so you can listen to music, but when the DJ-X30 receives a scanner signal, it will automatically give priority to the received signal. When the received signal is gone, it will automatically return to the AUX port input. Final thoughts. This scanner I would reccomend to the beginner or slightly more intermediate user. For its price it has some nice features such as ctcss although dcs would also have been nice, the descrambler feature I know will be useful for many people. I found it streets ahead of the DJX-7 scanner that I reveiewed a few months before. The frequency coverage is very good and should not leave anyone out in the cold. Even covering the military airband. My thanks must go to Nevada Communications for the loan of the set. Nevada currently sell the DJX-30 for £119.00 Click the logo below to go to Nevada's DJX-30 page.
10/09/07
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reviewed.[ Aor 8200 ]
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