The Jingtong JT-308

Enter the Dragon – Jingtong Handhelds

The Jingtong JT-208 and related JT-308 are handheld VHF and UHF transceivers respectively which are being knocked out at a frightening rate for the growing number of building sites and other portable communication needs in China. They are available in the UK from http://www.jingtong.co.uk/

My father GM4KGK recently bought a pack of five 2 metre ones which worked out at about £23 each. He gave one to me last month and has been passing them round at cost to the local ops in the Highlands and Islands including Dave Roberts of SWM/Monitoring Monthly fame, who I believe is very pleased with it.

It comes with a drop in charger base which uses a Chinese two pin mains plug. An adapter is supplied for UK sockets so you just plug in and go.

The supplied antenna is, as you would imagine, not all that special. I can just about hear a weak signal from GB3DA on it. Using an adaptor from SMA to BNC (this is not supplied), I've used a BNC based Watson super-gainer antenna. This gets me clear reception from GB3DA here in Witham, and I did hear Colin G0TRM running the Tuesday night Chelmsford ARS net and sounding superb.

I haven't tried TX on it, although I'm warned that the TX audio can be a bit muffled. There's a bodge you can do to drill a small hole in the case that's supposed to improve things no end although I haven't tried this yet.

The battery is decent, and the thing works on standby for days. Audio output is generous and all the normal goodies are on there like CTCSS, different channel spacing, repeater offsets, etc. This is the general feature list for the JT-208:

• Pwr/Vol, squelch controls
• 1.8-2.5W output power
• ±5kHz deviation
• Sensitivity 0.16uV (12dB SINAD)
• 15 channels
• 5/10/12.5/25kHz step
• Direct frequency entry
• Channel scanning
• Frequency scanning
• Keypad lock
• Earphone socket
• ± split operation
• CTCSS (38 frequencies)
• Battery 7.2V NiMH, 600mA TX, <100mA RX, 20mA standby
• Blue LED backlit display

For the money, it's excellent and I have only found one thing that I don't like about it. When you first switch on, it produces a series of rising audio tones. These cannot be switched off and are pretty loud.

The manual is not all that useful simply because of the poor translation between Chinese and English, which yields gems such as "lock cirtle frequency compose technology" which I'm guessing means PLL.

All in all, an absolute bargain at £40 and even better still if you club in with your chums and get a "trade pack" which gets the cost down even more. A pack of 5 costs around the same price as a single equivalent Japanese "handie".

Duncan Munro M0KGK
http://www.m0kgk.co.uk/

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