DJ-X11 hacking and review
Thursday 22 September 2011 at 11:35 pm Recently I picked up a new toy: the Alinco DJ-X11. I intended to buy one a while ago but ran into difficulties obtaining one as the part of Japan that manufactures it was at the time underwater...The scanner itself is very nice: here's a simple overview
The last one's a bigger deal than it sounds. The discriminator output is the raw output of the signal before the amplifier, squelch or filters - vital for receiving any digital mode at any greater than about 1200 baud reliably. The IQ out (in phase / quadrature) encoded signal output means you can do SDR (where you process and demodulate the signal in software allowing you to do all sorts of fun things). The bandwidth of the output signal seemed to be about 80khz when it was pulled into a computer with 96khz sound in. I'll try and find one with 192k capability and see what I get, and a friend of mine is very interested and has access to some interesting and expensive gear, so you'll inevitably find the full specs and exactly what it's capable of soon. But as for the normal AF out, it's only on the left channel. It's capable of outputting on the right channel for the IQ out and I think the discriminator out is on the right as well. Come on, one more switch and you'd get right what every single other scanner gets wrong. Oh well, I'll just have to make an adaptor.
The sensitivity on air band seems good - although the squelch could do with a bit of adjustment. You could open the squelch and reasonably clearly hear a signal that was rejected at "1".
The user manual is reasonably good but it would be nicer if it wasn't half warnings and disclaimers. You *can* mention a feature without saying "Warning: we don't guarantee this works" and there is even a warning about poking yourself in the eye with the antenna when you have the scanner in your shirt pocket. There's also a warning saying not to put the plug pack into a power board with other devices - only a wall socket with nothing else. Why? Does it somehow draw 2400 watts? That, and *everything* voids the warranty - any "third party accessory". So I guess if you want to plug headphones in I hope nothing breaks... or you'd better be using Alinco's headphones. There's also two separate warnings not to open the device because you may get an "electric shock". From a device that runs off 4.8 volts and doesn't even have RF transmission hardware? Oh, and don't clean the unit with Benzene. It's forbidden (not to mention carcinogenic).
Other features? The E version which I have apparently includes a voice inversion scramble decoder . All very great but besides it having one, it's not mentioned at all in the manual how or where to use it. Edit: found it: hit Fn then 5 for the CTCSS/DCS menu, then keep pressing 5 until it says SCR, turn the knob to select the inversion frequency between 2800 and 4200 in 50hz steps
Overall, the UI makes reasonable sense. The only thing you might want to do is swap the main and sub band knobs in Set Mode as the "main" one is by default next to the antenna - and harder to get at than the "sub" one.
Other tip: the sub band is actually capable of tuning down to 225mhz by entering a key sequence shown on page 33 of the manual. But you're on your own as to how well this works. What would be nice is the ability to do a similar thing to squeeze a few more Mhz out of the top of the sub band - 480 would be nice as UHF CB is on 477...
The frequency counter tune works reasonably well - it found the frequency close to a transmitting radio nearby, only about 10khz off (it hit the start of where you could pick it up on FM).
Scanning speed is very fast - and on the fastest settings doesn't seem to miss frequencies providing the signal is reasonable.
Now for the bad points:
The PC software.
First, you need to buy a cable. And the cable is $80. There is a miniUSB socket on the back of the charge cradle. But It's not USB. The company I bought the radio from said that "only about one in five buy the cable, so four wouldn't need it and that would make the radio more expensive". I countered with "it costs $80, so they'd try to avoid doing so". Apparently it's normal to enter a hundred frequencies using the dial and keypad - not my choice of ways to spend a day, but some people are into strange things.
There are two cables you can get: the ERW-7 and ERW-8. The ERW-7 plugs into the headphone socket and allows cloning only. I decided to look on eBay for knockoffs of both. According to the eBay seller I got my IC-R5 cable from, it works with the DJ-X11 too as an ERW-7. Except it doesn't. So I got a 3.3v FTDI breakout, connected TX and RX together and hooked it up to a 3.5mm plug. No luck there. Tried it on the R5 with CS-R5 and it worked.
So I decided to have a go at the ERW-8 instead. Seeing as I couldn't buy one out of Hong Kong, I was going to have to do it myself. Alinco's site disclaimed any responsibility for driver issues or install questions (as they disclaim absolutely everything else, why not?), but provided driver install instructions. FTDI's PDF with a page of extra rubbish on the front. Ahh, so it's a FTDI USB to serial cable. I guess it's TTL serial on a miniUSB connector - that must make sense to someone somewhere... I opened the cradle up, and found where all the pins go. Multimetered the back of the radio and found that two of the contacts go straight to the battery. Guessed the third one was serial, and wrapped wires round the contacts, connecting the negative side of the battery to ground, and the other contact to TX and RX (TX and RX are typically connected to the one line - half duplex serial :D). It worked!
I'm still not sure if the software doesn't recognise the radio through the headphone jack, because the two protocols are I believe different. Or maybe one of DTR, RTS, CTS etc is tied to ground/vcc in the Alinco cable to signal what it is.
I decided that the cradle would be more useful with a real miniUSB on it, so I soldered the FTDI breakout in.
That FTDI chip would cost under $5 in the quantities you would be buying them in (the breakout is $15 from Sparkfun, still a heap cheaper than the Alinco cable), would easily fit on that board and would be a ton more useful. There'd even be room to get it into the radio itself and provide a miniUSB socket on it. For what is a simple USB to serial adaptor, that is not OK. It should have been in the box with the FTDI chip in the cradle, not a $80 accessory. Rule #1: don't annoy people who can reverse engineer your product.
I had to cut some plastic out of the bottom piece to make it all fit together though, so it's a little ugly on the back, but it works.
With that out of the way, onto the PC software:
The programming software is an utter joke. It's written in VB6, and I thought CS-R5 was bad before I used this. It's so much worse. The software assumes that you are running on Japanese Windows (and Alinco disclaims any issues that happen if you're not), and no, that table view is not directly editable. The UI is a total mess - a fixed height nightmare! I'm told that it's because I don't have the right version of the Tahoma font installed - installing fonts to make a program work?
Oh, it does NOT end there.
Looks like some eight year old's "My First Radio Scanner Controller". Overflowing text boxes, big ugly fonts, orange vs green colour scheme, improperly labelled buttons, badly aligned text, badly aligned UI elements, overflowing text... Oh, and if anything goes wrong, don't expect to be told why: all you get is "error". And finally, make sure you select which model you have in the not very well documented radio buttons up the top - if you don't have the X11E, you're just going to be told "Error" otherwise.
It's even worse when you actually use it. I thought the Japanese were obsessed with quality and making things nice to use? I'm pretty sure even Feidaxian's programming software isn't this bad. Reading from the radio is slow when you want to read the whole lot of frequencies in (you thought reading in a R5 was slow when you didn't select the "high speed" option for serial?). It requests each memory channel from the radio sequentially. Very bad.
Bank selection is even worse. Banks are in order in the list, and you say "the first 12 are in bank A, the next 6 are in bank B, the next 6 are in bank C". But if your bank allocations don't add up to 1200, it won't let you program (apparently just putting the rest in the last bank automatically is not OK). Oh, and if you want to add another frequency to bank A, you'll have to manually reprogram everything below it down a slot if you don't export as CSV and figure it out that way. Very very tedious.
Expect a reverse-engineering of the software and possibly the ERW-8 cable to come soon. It'd be easier for me to write my own software than use that.