The Great South African G90 2021 Tour
I used to own a Yaesu FT-857D, three of them, in fact. With them I made all sorts of contacts: straight contacts, QRP digital contacts, mobile FM contacts, and they even pushed my FL2100Z amplifier to full output when I needed to. I loved them and trusted them. While the screen might have been a little small for my older eyes, the radios never ever let me down. I still miss them a lot.
But times are moving on and instead of following the way of the FT-101 and other dinosaurs (don’t get me wrong: They were excellent radios) I wanted to get some first hand experience of the more current SDR radio trends. First I bought a mcHF portable 5 watt radio which was a great buy and I’ll talk about that more in another post, but then I wanted to but a really “complete” radio for the bush. Smaller than the FT-857 but bigger than the mcHF and an all-rounder. The dice was rolled and fell on the Xiegu G90 which arrived in my shack a few weeks ago. While we can discuss all the details at length in other posts, this post is to let it travel around the country and experience different operators and conditions and antennas.
Thus, the idea of “The Great South African G90 2021 Tour” was born. I decided to let my baby go visit some new places. My ICOM 7100 will have to do backup duty in the shack while the baby is travelling.
First stop of the tour was my bush camp. I took my Xiegu G90 on a week long tour to the bush in Dikhololo (north of Brits and Hartebeespoort Dam). I have to admit it was a lot of fun to operate, even though the noise levels were appalling and in many cases made operating impossible on a particular spot.
In summary I was very happy with it. It is not a big radio but it can stand its own.
The cabling takes up a lot of space 
Look at that noise! 
My assistant helping me with the antenna 
My little assistant providing comments 
A standard 49:1 toroid from my shop hastily mounted in a small box 
A hastily cut EFHW resonates perfectly 
Quickly soldering the balun in place 
Hiding in the corner is the G90 
The support kit takes up most of the space 
