HF on a Hand Held?

Radioditty sent the new GS-10B Pro to me before it was released as they wanted you to see it first. When sending it, they never told me what to say, only to review it. So below is what I honestly experienced.

This handheld radio is not only dualband UHF, VHF radio, it also receives HF, single sideband, and CW. It has a waterfall display as well, plus a load of other goodies which I hadn’t seen in a handheld before. So, let’s have a look.

Some of the things this radio includes is a realtime spectrum display, which is the same as a waterfall. It’s got full HF, single sideband and CW reception. It’s an all band scanner receiver that covers most of UHF, VHF, HF, airband, and FM radio stations. It also connects to the weather station if you have them in your country.

It has two SMA connectors on the top. One that does for UHF and VHF and the other one is for the donut antennas that’s supplied which I will look at soon. You can program the radio either via computer or even by your mobile phone or direct input or each frequency. The direct option is a lot easier than has been before as the menu seems a lot better.

It has a 250 milliamp rechargeable battery that can be charged using USB-C cord and it has dual PTT and dual watch as well.

The 1.77 inch color screen is fantastic especially for the waterfall and I love the display how it shows not only the frequency the frequency name and the channel number when in memory mode it shows a whole lot more like signal strength and all sorts of things.

This upgraded PRO model has 999 channels, so you can store a lot more in there than you ever have before. It can transmit on the normal VHF and UHF bands, but it will also receive right down to 150 kHz.

Looking at the radio itself, the speaker is behind the keypad, which gives the radio a little bit more real estate.

They got quite a lot of menus in the radio making it a lot more functional. I have done a video below on this, which I receomend you watch it.

As an example, menu item 32 is autolock. So you can change that to how many seconds.

So one of the things you might like to do is to listen to HF. So how do you do that? If you go into the menu and I’m going to go to menu 2 4 (which takes me to menu 24). This menu item is where you program what the PF3 key is. I’m going to make sure that that is set to radio, then press confirm. So then if I press this PF3, it’ll go to radio. The next thing you should do is change the antenna to the donut antenna.

Take off the VHF/UHF antenna and next to it is a knob that screws off to reviel where you attach the donut antenna. You can plug in an external antenna if you like.

When listening to HF, if you press and hold down the home key, you get a waterfall right across the band.

The Radioddity GS-10B Pro is a high-power 8W handheld ham radio designed for long-range communication. At the time of this video, it had not been released yet. This new radio is built as an upgraded version of the popular tri-band radio, however, this portable transceiver features a real-time spectrum analyser (waterfall display) on a 1.77-inch color display, allowing you to instantly scan, view, and locate active frequencies in your area. Its precious model without all the extras is widely used by amateur radio operators for satellite communication, emergency readiness, and Parks on the Air (POTA) activations.

This handheld radio has advanced shortwave listening. The GS-10B Pro handheld transceiver includes wideband HF monitoring with SSB (Single Sideband) and CW modes. Unlike standard analog radios, it has a dual-antenna path system with two SMA ports to keep high-frequency and VHF/UHF signals clear and separate. It also comes with two donut antennas.

To make setup simple, the radio features built-in Bluetooth wireless programming, so you can easily configure channels, update your codeplug, and manage repeater offsets directly from an Android or iOS smartphone app without a computer programming cable.

The hardware is optimized for survival gear and off-grid use, with a 2500mAh USB-C rechargeable battery that supports 2A fast charging. It comes equipped with dual PTT (Push-to-Talk) switches for seamless dual-band monitoring and an extra physical channel knob for quick frequency tuning. If you are buying your first ham radio or looking for a budget-friendly backup radio, custom noise reduction, and standard Kenwood 2-pin accessories.

If you go via this link, you will get a discount:
https://radioddity.refr.cc/bensangster then search for your item


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Yes, this popular girl name is actually an Amateur Radio term.

Christian, DK8EW, put me onto Olivia after we chatted on VARA HF. I had heard about Olivia before, but he encouraged me to give it ago.

Soon I made contact with VK4XP and must say it is a great digital format, though I understand a lot feel voice to voice is better (as I do). That said, this digital mode doesn’t require as much bandwidth, so has the potential to go further. The typical Olivia signal can still be decoded when the amplitude of the noise is over ten times that of the Olivia signal which is amazing.

Olivia is part of the family of MFSK modes and has a high redundancy Forward Error Correction system similar to MT63. The MFSK family is very large with many modes, so it can make it very difficult to work out which is which when you hear it. Olivia works really well on poor HF paths.

Olivia digital modes are commonly referred to by the number of tones and the bandwidth, in Hertz, used. Therefore, it is common to express the Olivia digital mode as Olivia X/Y (or Olivia Y/X ), where X refers to the number of different audio tones transmitted and Y refers to the bandwidth in hertz over which these signals are spread. Examples of common Olivia modes are 8/250 (meaning, 8 tones/250-Hertz bandwidth), 16/500, and, 32/1000. There are three popular Olivia modes, which is 8-FSK, 16-FSK and 32-FSK, that have three, four or five bits per symbol.

Olivia QSO Formats

Format Bandwidth / TonesAudio Centre Marker (Hz)BaudDecode S/N Radio (dB)Speed WPM
500/16*75031.25-1319.5
1000/32*100031.25-1224.4
500/875062.5-1129.3
1000/16100062.5-1039.1
500/4750125-1039.1
250/862531.25-1414.6
* Is the most common Olivia format in use currently

Here is a video that will give you more information:

While Olivia could acutally be used anywhere in the data allocated area on HF, however you may not find anyone if you are not on the right frequency. Below is the suggested calling frequencies used around the world:

I’ve typed to many people around the world on this mode and surprised how well it works when conditions are not great. The software tells you if there is another conversation on the band also which is handy.

There are a few protocols, like using BTU (back to you) on your last line and some shortcut typing which isn’t the same as the youth of today use in text messages!

While I still prefer voice contacts with people, at least this option is a conversation and something different when conditions are not favourable.

What are your thoughts on this mode? Have you tried it? Have you had success? What radio and band did you try?


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