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A few weeks back I got myself an X108g on the fleet market at HamRadio in Friedrichshafen.
The rig worked fine in the beginning with some pecularities which I haven'tunderstood and fixed yet, but this will be a different report.
My serial number is X113??, which seems to be a rather late sample of the X108g series.
When I got the rig, the software offered "SWR" and "Spectrum" menu items right away (which are not documented in the user guide), and from today I know that this requires some late firmware. Early firmwares offer either none of both, or "SWR", or (latest) both "SWR" and "Spectrum". I have the suspicion that these features got implemented late for the American market, maybe for the X108g variants branded and sold by "Connect Systems".
Debugging my pecularities, I thought getting some fresh software into the rig might be good idea.
After that, the rig wasn't transmitting or receiving any more.
After opening up, I found that the local oscillator board wasn't controlled properly. Old softwares provided no serial signals at all, more recent softwares provided clock, but no data. Only "X108G_OLED_FW_V2.00.1_build011(Last version sent to me from Xiegu 2022-08-14)" controlled the local oscillator board properly, all others reproducibly don't. This is interesting. I haven't opened up the processor shield (laziness), but I suspect there is some buffer/driver IC which requires firmware attention, old HW versions might not have and not be aware of...
It appears that the small signal (baseband) schematics and the layouts printed in the service manual also don't match well with each other. There are components on the footprint view which don't appear in the schematics. Maybe this got mixed up by accident, maybe by intention in order not to share too much of the schematics too easily. Who knows?
My small signal (baseband) board's version is V1.43.ORTM, and it's functions and components are different from the service manual.
I haven't found according schematics on the internet yet, proposals and hints welcome!
So, what are my bottomline so far?
>> my small signal board revision V1.43.ORTM needs (at least?) X108G_OLED_FW_V2.00.1_build011(Last version sent to me from Xiegu 2022-08-14) to work well with the local oscillator board!
>> don't trust the service manual schematics too much when diagnosing function and problems, there might be considerable mismatches!
The rig worked fine in the beginning with some pecularities which I haven'tunderstood and fixed yet, but this will be a different report.
My serial number is X113??, which seems to be a rather late sample of the X108g series.
When I got the rig, the software offered "SWR" and "Spectrum" menu items right away (which are not documented in the user guide), and from today I know that this requires some late firmware. Early firmwares offer either none of both, or "SWR", or (latest) both "SWR" and "Spectrum". I have the suspicion that these features got implemented late for the American market, maybe for the X108g variants branded and sold by "Connect Systems".
Debugging my pecularities, I thought getting some fresh software into the rig might be good idea.
After that, the rig wasn't transmitting or receiving any more.
After opening up, I found that the local oscillator board wasn't controlled properly. Old softwares provided no serial signals at all, more recent softwares provided clock, but no data. Only "X108G_OLED_FW_V2.00.1_build011(Last version sent to me from Xiegu 2022-08-14)" controlled the local oscillator board properly, all others reproducibly don't. This is interesting. I haven't opened up the processor shield (laziness), but I suspect there is some buffer/driver IC which requires firmware attention, old HW versions might not have and not be aware of...
It appears that the small signal (baseband) schematics and the layouts printed in the service manual also don't match well with each other. There are components on the footprint view which don't appear in the schematics. Maybe this got mixed up by accident, maybe by intention in order not to share too much of the schematics too easily. Who knows?
My small signal (baseband) board's version is V1.43.ORTM, and it's functions and components are different from the service manual.
I haven't found according schematics on the internet yet, proposals and hints welcome!
So, what are my bottomline so far?
>> my small signal board revision V1.43.ORTM needs (at least?) X108G_OLED_FW_V2.00.1_build011(Last version sent to me from Xiegu 2022-08-14) to work well with the local oscillator board!
>> don't trust the service manual schematics too much when diagnosing function and problems, there might be considerable mismatches!