[time-nuts] Cheap GPSDO's

Alan Ambrose alan.ambrose at anagram.net
Thu Feb 11 16:43:16 UTC 2016


>>> For more money, yixunhk has some nicely packaged units and AFAIK he has a good reputation.

BTW I have a '58503A' from him. It did and does (a year later) still work, although it took me a while to get it going. But it was a bit iffy - obviously in a re-made case and the eBay images were not actually of this unit although he had obviously taken care to tell a good story with pictures of the inside etc ... all the way along to a shot of it getting GPS lock. Except the pictures were not of the unit of he sent me - actually when I looked more closely they were of at least three other units. The responses I got were not encouraging and of the 'sorry I don't understand' kind. There's been previous reports of yixunhk sending out units with rust inside so I started to be suspicious when I saw the 'cal' sticker protecting it (there's no cal on these units of course). Here's an extract:

Yixunhk: "Sorry for the inconvenience. Do you mean the unit we sent to you is different from the pictures we have listed on ebay, or is different from other pictures of Z58503A on ebay? Pls advise. Thank you."

Me: "To be clear - pictures 2 and 4 in the eBay description are not of this device. Picture 2 shows a top view of the inside of the device but clearly shows 4 BNC connectors. However, both the device sent and picture 4 have 2 BNC connectors. Also, picture 4 shows a back view with a serial number of 3710xxx and is marked for BTS power, but the device sent has a sticker with Z3801A on it and a serial number 3625xxx and is marked for BSC power (see attached image). It looks to me that there are mixed pictures of at least 3 different devices. So, my question is - what exactly has been sent?"

Yixunhk: "This unit was fully tested and it's functional before shipped out. This Z3801A is upgarded to 58503A by us and the feature is the same as 58503A. The connectors are RS-232 but not BNC. Pls refer to the service manual of 58503A to connect to the RS-232 connector which is different from the connected way of Z3801A. We have one more unit in stock and the pictures listed on ebay is another one for reference."

Blah blah blah ... as I said I did get it working in the end.

Alan



More information about the Time-nuts_lists.febo.com mailing list