Review of the Feidaxin FDC-460A ham radio

I heard some decent reviews about the Feidaxin brand of ham radios. These have been what we call 'Rice Box' Radios. They hail from parts of Asia and with that come at a very cheap price. On average a single band radio will sport about $60 USD or so. Being that they are damn cheap makes them appealing, but are you getting what you pay for?



From my experience with my FDC-460A its not completely horrible. For $60 I cant complain much.

The good:
Inexpensive.
Works great as a spare radio
Just fine for a simple radio that does repeater, CTCSS, and DCS.
Unlocked in the entire 400-460MHz band, use as FRS/GMRS (or other) Radio.
Decent solid design, I wouldnt beat it up but its not a bad radio.
Ni-MH Cells, easy to upgrade or replace if you are handy with a soldering iron.
Full 5 Watt on all frequencies. Or 1 watt in low power.
Option for programming cable for the PC and software to program the memory channels.
99 memory banks.
Can be put in "Stupid User Mode" which allows the user to cycle through the programmed. channels, like a regular 2-way radio.

The Bad:
No Alpha tags, you have to memorize your frequency list, unless you put it in "Dumb mode"
Scan speed is slow, even for an HT.
Digital Squelch.
The charge dock mashes in the bottom row of buttons on the radio, its hard to dock.
Battery charge time isnt the best.
They have a male SMA connector on the radio, which is weird.
User manual is in horrible engrish, but with some common sense its not hard to figure out.
Programming software is usable but in engrish.
Some people report having defects.
Doesnt operate the best in extreme cold, so dont keep it in the car during winter.
Programming the radio by hand is a pain in the ass, but isnt that said for all HTs?
When using a headset you cant use the PTT button on the radio, you must use the PTT on the headset... thats just weird too.
No VOX Support (I dont like VOX anyways).

General
I use mine on both ham radio bands, local security (in hindsight I should have gotten the 410-470Mhz model), FRS/GMRS, and anything else in between. The squelch control is menu driven, you may not like it. I dont mind so much but being I have been an HT and Scanner user for many years I am very accustomed to manually adjusting my squelch while in the field. The 1W / 5W power selection does seem like a small drawback especially for battery consumption, but this is common on even expensive radios. I like having a Low-Medium-High setting. The fact that it can do full 5W (closer to 4W on the upper band) is nice though. I can pop on the FRS/GMRS bands at 5 Watt. Yes, I know it is not legal to operate over 0.5W on FRS Bands. Blow me, I dont give a rats ass. When an emergency arises I can hand out a small fleet of FRS radios and use this FDC-460 as a repeater node (with some additional hardware). I have seen report of some people making low-cost, low-power mobile/portable repeaters out of these lil' buggers. This is also great for an inexpensive APRS Radio

If you just need a spare radio to hand to the kids, wife, or friend to keep in contact via simplex, or have a friend that wants to get into the hobby and you dont mind being control operator for them, this isnt a bad choice. I keep this as a backup and when I am out hand it to my lil' lady Bunnie, or even my other friends when we want to go shopping and I want to fuck off. I see crappy FRS/GMRS radios that cost just as much and dont offer the features this thing has.

It also has full PL tone (CTCSS) and DCS Support which is also used on many security fleet radios, FRS/GMRS, and Ham Radio Repeaters. Unfortunately the lack of Alpha Tags you need to memorize what all your frequencies belong to. There is a mode you can boot the radio in by holding the [F] key and turning on the radio which puts it into what I call "Dumb mode". It will list each programmed frequency as a number in a list, rather the frequency. It also locks out the ability to manually tune in a frequency, play with the offset, PL/DCS, and other settings. This way you can set it up, hand it to an inexperienced user and just tell them "Tune to channel 4" or whatever...

I would definitely recommend getting the programming cable. Programming any HT for me is a major time consuming pain in the ass. Unfortunately the software is in Engrish as well. For me it wasnt hard to get working at all, but I am an experienced hacker and technophile. I have noticed that most Hams have as much computer skill as a 4 year old child on drugs, or worse. Just make sure you get the right programming cable, if you are using XP, go for the USB one. Dont even ask for OSX or Linux support! I wouldnt consider this a major purchase factor though.

Some minor quirks
For some odd reason they put a male SMA connector on the radio. Typically you see the male connectors on the Rubber Duck Antenna or Coax. A female SMA coupler fixes this though.

(Yes, it came with a very nice antenna)

Another small quirk I noticed is that if you use a headset you cant use the PTT on the radio. It will transmit but no audio will travel from the HT. You must use the PTT on the headset. There is no VOX control, which I dont use anyway. I find that loud cars, alarms, and background noise tend to false-trigger most VOX controls since I am not a typical fat, lazy ham that hasnt seen his penis in years. I use my radio out in the field and I am very active in general, and this radio has done a pretty good job so far. For $60 shipped... I cant bitch.

The funk never ends

As many of you from BSoD have noticed the show has been canceled due to a severe lack of help from the community. I have been griping about it for quite some time with the honest hopes of my blunt honesty it would perk people into helping out. After all of the unreliable boasts of segments, a busy and moderately unstable social life, and proceeding health issues, I do not have the resources to maintain the show with just the help of Mustang alone. He has been on the edge of severe diabetes for quite some time and I do not want to put any more burden on him than his health and family already do. I have plenty of segment content myself, but this isnt going to be The Foxx Show, ever, despite the fact that 90% of the fans of BSoD think I am the main man behind it all. I will take credit in getting things started, taking off in the direction we have, and sustaining interesting content for all these years, but I will never be the viable dictator commanding people to come forward to help that people assume me to be.

Onto my own personal affairs. Scuba from the BSoD community sent me a Wyse S10 terminal. It sports a 300Mhz AMD Geoge CPU, DDR RAM, and a typical 44 pin IDE header. The hardware is very similar to the WebDT 366. I have been trying to work my magic on it but one thing has really been putting roadblocks in my way, and thats nazi-computing. Wyse designed the BIOS so it will boot from USB only if it contains a specific partition and disk image layout which is 100% proprietary to their hardware. This thing is just a small form factor computer with a crippling BIOS so they can make sure you keep crawling back to them for support.

With the custom USB Booting aside I popped my Compact Flash card from my WebDT 366 into the Wyse S10 with the aid of an IDE to CF adapter and 44 pin ribbon cable. Besides the fact that the Windows XP install had absolutely no drivers for the hardware and I couldnt log into it, the thing boot just fine as expected. I could easily deploy a Linux distro from another host computer then tailor it once its in the Wyse S10. There is also the option to do a Network Install of an OS using PXE NetBoot, that is something I havent tried before so I will give it a whirl when I get some spare time.

The WebDT 366 is coming along as well. I caught a great deal on some Memorex 8GB Traveldrives. They are old but as soon as I saw them they looked a wee bit bigger than a typical Compact Flash or Microdrive. I decided to roll the dice and use my technophile intuition and I got three of them for about $8 a piece. As soon as I got them I popped one open and my assumption was correct, 8GB Microdrives! I tossed one onto the WebDT 366 IDE bus and installed XP a little hastily. In my excitement I didnt pay much attention to the finer details of the install so right now its far from optimal, however the Microdrive is operating in UDMA mode 2, which is a max transfer speed of 33.3MB/sec compared to the Compact Flash cards PIO Mode 4 which is only 16.5MB/sec. Any attempt to force these cards to operate any faster using BIOS settings make the OS crash almost instantly. I know these speeds sound like a ball busting crawl but hey, this unit is durable!

Something else I found out while doing all of this work with Compact Flash and Microdrives. I thought I had fried my CF cards because they wouldnt boot an OS anymore. Assuming I blew out some of the NAND gates in the MBR section of the cards, which is why I got the microdrives. After my second install of XP on one of the cards which I used for a different device I came across the same issue I had with the CF cards! Using a simple linux command recommended to me by another BSoD'er, Modat7, I did a full binary wipe of the drive inside of a linux virtual machine with the drive on a USB adapter. After the process was done I went back to work installing the OS on the native host hardware and dont'cha know it, it worked flawlessly. Unfortunately I cant exactly replicate the cause of this problem, or explain why it happens, but now I know how to identify and fix it.

With a little more time and patience I should have the DT366 in a field ready test phase. Ive unbricked my Zipit Z2, and the WebTV 2 RM4100 is running different OS flavors just nicely. The RM4100 needs a peck more work with some hardware hacks though. I have also reworked my Nokia n800 with a more stable and useful configuration for field work. With the help of Metatron I was able to get my WiSpy hooked up but the USB is so unstable its pretty much worthless as a 2.4Ghz spectrum analyzer. I will try out the WebDT soon but I need to focus on the OS and fine tune it to squeeze every bit, byte, and nibble of resources out of it.

Over the holiday I rebuilt the battery pack for a Microsoft Pharos Bluetooth GPS which I am quite proud of. Its sporting an interchangeable Ni-MH 3-Cell pack.


I also built a TNC-x kit which is (hopefully) going to air on BSoD once we kick back into production. I had to do some very minor modification to the serial port hookup which involved having to make a DIP socket Piggyback to get the leads out to the connector. I didnt have enough room to hook into the onboard DB-9 serial port and I didnt want to solder leads onto the PCB itself. I felt that it could be a cause for failure in the future.



In time all of these devices will be modular with one another adding onto their capabilities. They will combine to make different types of terminals, scanners, desktops, and portable mobile mayhem generators.