Brand new, but old model Chinese Icoms

[paulears]

For a few years now one of my Chinese suppliers has been selling me those batches of old radios. When popular brands were OEM’d in China, then assembled into the complete units for badging as ‘made in Japan’. Typically always models from around fifteen years ago, discontinued maybe ten to five years back. My supplier would source circuit boards from one source and batteries from another and then the cases from another. Eventually you have a radio. Programmable from the original software, with no differences at all from the original. Just lacking the latest features.

One that was popular was the Icom IC-V8, and the only difference seemed to be that the injection moulding machines were fed with plastic slightly the wrong shade of dark green. Eventually the stocks ran out. I found a different dealer who had a few, but the three are weird. Everything is identical, but the repeater shift is all wrong! The US version had an auto repeater shift, the rest of the world didn’t, and I think the three I have were American spec that has been ‘modded’ to switch that off. It means that the shift seems to be in increments of 200kHz but the direction upwards or downwards is random. If I set the frequency to 145.600 and the shift to 0.600 and downwards, pressing the minus shift transmits on 145.475! Simplex, and memory operation is fine, but all three are identical in their bizarre behaviour. Worse, the software doesn’t work either. I suspect they’ve been assembled ok, but from a mix of different country versions. It’s a shame I can’t make them work. The cloning feature works but I don’t have a working one to try. I’ve had a lot of luck with old models, with my original supplier, just the new one is a bit clueless, I suspect jus5 having bought a job lot in. The old supplier has loads of brand new old Motorolas too but the software of course is XP vintage which kills the attractiveness.